> Cosmetics are the prime example of an honest F2P, as they have zero impact on the game

To have zero impact on the game, they'd have to not be a part of the game. Or have ever existed at all, really.

But if you think they are so meaningless, why do you think people buy them? Also, don't you think convincing someone to buy nothing sounds like something a con artist would do?

> allow the developers to eat

How do microtransactions feed developers? Do you just mean because its their job to build the game? (which necessarily includes the various monetisation systems)

> But if you think they are so meaningless, why do you think people buy them?

Because they're fun.

Some people are willing to spend $5 so that their Rocket League car is the Batmobile. It has no effect on the mechanics of the game (Your car's hitbox is still the same, and it has the same speed/acceleration), but makes the game that much more enjoyable for the player.

In Splitgate (F2P FPS), I bought the battle pass for $10 because I wanted my assault rifle to look like it was made of cardboard. The damage and accuracy didn't change. It's a purely cosmetic effect that I thought was amusing.

> How do microtransactions feed developers? Do you just mean because its their job to build the game? (which necessarily includes the various monetisation systems)

Don't act like you think you know what was meant. It's annoying and smells like bad faith.

Splitgate is annoying because some skins look red and blue and you can't tell what team they're on. I haven't played enough to find out how long it takes to get used to that. It's also a poor quality game and precisely the type of thing that comes to mind when I hear F2P (I realize Splitgate may have started out as a fun project more than a microtransaction cow from the outset). I quickly returned to Halo. I prefer playing games that actually feel like real products and are created by people who know what they're doing.

In F2P games you need to spend hundreds of hours to either grind to unlock basic functionality, or even if they don't have grinding, you still need skins or everyone will leave your party because they assume you're a noob. Skins drag down game performance. I've seen literal billion dollar games where it ran perfectly fine until they added waves of skins. Also multiple games where each time someone comes near you with a skin, the game freezes to load the skin (probably a blocking socket call in the middle of the main game client loop, as that's the quality you get in such games). And in most games, emotes and skins allow unintended behavior that gives advantages to their users. This is what happens when you focus all dev work on designing skins and zero thought goes into how they would affect the game.

Now, since you don't want to spend hundreds of hours unlocking the ability to play the game on a level playing field, you will probably want to spend money to unlock these things. This will costs hundreds of dollars, far more than you would pay for an actual real game. Even if you unlock them the free way, there's a high chance your account eventually gets banned. As, once again, the studio has no experience in anything other than skin design, and have no idea how their game actually works and will cave in to every single basic cheating allegation and social crap like "he was in my game therefore he stream sniped me". Again, if you have ever played a game in the last 30 years, you would be well aware that most people in charge do not understand very basics like how you could infer an enemy is near you because you heard him behind the wall, or he triggered something on the map somewhere that tells the other player that trigger was indeed triggered across the map.

> zero impact

Obviously false unless you have never played a game before.