I'm not sure I agree they're any more unhealthy than the non-MMORPG games full of microtransactions trying to get more money than the upfront cost in this day and age.
We've reinvented how arcade games used to try and extract maximum quarters, but the iteration cycle is so much faster now that we can't really play whack-a-mole on all the pathological human manipulation strategies people deploy now, and with people not being able to physically walk away from their phones or other devices in many cases, it's Bad(tm).
> I'm not sure I agree they're any more unhealthy than the non-MMORPG games full of microtransactions
I used to think: “Anything that got rid of the ‘pointless grinding’ aspect of RPGs would be an improvement.” And then micro transactions and pay-to-win got invented. I didn’t think it was possible but game designers somehow actually managed to make RPGs even worse!
The thing to keep in mind, is that some people find that kind of grind satisfying, and different people enjoy different levels of it.
Some people find incremental progression for weeks or months or years at an achievement point or something similarly ephemeral to be satisfying. Some people think that it's not worth doing anything that you can't get in one play session.
Neither of them are wrong, for them, necessarily, but I do believe there's a nonzero amount of friction you want to introduce, and various sweet spots for friction versus people saying it's too much but still loving the game and playing it versus it actually driving away too many people.
I have played a number of fairly grindy games to various definitions of completion, and found it satisfying to play them more than once and get a lot of the optional objectives again. I have other friends who spend a week just grinding out the cap of various items in early game and then coast through the rest and think anyone who thinks a week of nothing but grinding to do that is mind-numbing and unpleasant is just wrong. I have other friends who have refused to play games older than PS4 era because the graphics not being hyper-realistic drives them out of the game and they think anyone who enjoys anything remotely grindy is just rationalizing broken systems.
But ultimately, for many games, you play them for the incremental satisfaction, and ensuring you get a steady drip of that and incremental fixes of larger satisfaction until completion, without turning each hit into a microtransaction exploitation, is the essence of making a game that people want to play again. Nintendo does this very well, in a number of their games even in modern times.
I feel like not understanding that there is a certain amount of padding required for you to enjoy a game as much as you might otherwise, because humans don't process things instantly or handle a truly constant flow of engaging things well, is one of the things a lot of people I see who play games and complain about being bored when they bounced off spending more than 15 minutes on it don't appreciate.
(Not saying you're one of those people or making that argument, just that I see a lot of people arguing that various kinds of friction could be removed, without thinking about how much that changes the perceived experience.)
We've reinvented how arcade games used to try and extract maximum quarters, but the iteration cycle is so much faster now that we can't really play whack-a-mole on all the pathological human manipulation strategies people deploy now, and with people not being able to physically walk away from their phones or other devices in many cases, it's Bad(tm).