The Business: You Have Ten Minutes To Sell That Game, Not 100 Hours.

Josh Strife Hayes independently confirms what I'd been saying, especially with regard to MMORPGs.

What did I say? Normies will not work for their entertainment.

What do Normies do when something becomes difficult or tedious? They brute-force it, they skip it, or they quit.

What do predatory game companies do to exploit this? Make it deliberately tedious, put in sudden difficulty jumps, and sell brute-force solutions and skips in the cash shop. You see this most with Free To Play mobile trash, which is why F2P has the counter-intuitive most lucrative business model in gaming, but MMOs readily adopted it when it became clear that quality wasn't good enough to keep people playing otherwise.

The real solution is to put in the work required to make that early game thrilling and exciting--not tedious--without being difficult, something that every single MMORPG fails at one way or another.

People love to bag on Battlefield and Call of Duty, but those two franchises nail this point like the fist of an angry god. You start up COD, you are in it right away and you aren't spending more than 10 minutes before you're up to speed and playing the real game. Contrary to Josh's claim, Normies aren't going to give a game two hours to convince them; they give it that 10 minutes at most, often less--a minute or so--in practice, before they go "This game sucks" and move on.

You don't have the luxury of being able to make a player wait to have fun and play the real game, not anymore. The data is readily available for professionals to see when it comes to abandonment rates; the rise of deliberate predation over actually making games that address Normie wants out of entertainment shows what most corporate types--being Mammon Mobsters--actually think of both Normies and gaming.

And if you think this isn't applicable to other gaming media, then you're not paying attention to why boardgames leave tabletop RPGs in the dust. Know the Normie and win.