Tbh it’s more the getting users to gamble by paying for cases that got the ball rolling. Objectively, the least terrible monetization form is buying a game outright and then earning your items through playing as they used to do before free to play became normalized. That’s why all these shitty games come out with battle passes even though game developers did just fine supporting their game for a few years without the constant money churn. Because it’s the norm, people now think it’s impossible to have a game with updates that is bought outright, yet deep rock galactic does it just fine without $60/yr worth in battle passes.

I’d argue valve spearheading microtransactions was a bad thing, traceable to tf2 items and cases. People don’t give them enough flak for filling games with monetization.