The original game that added this in had a coin doubler (2x base currency). It was a C-rate 3rd person action game in a dystopian future with magic and terrible combat that I can’t be arsed to look up again. Giant Bomb used to have this sort of stuff well organized, but Giant Bomb sucks now. Anyway, this seemed like an odd cash grab for a crap game.
Burnout Paradise had a final bundled version released years later with a separately purchasable dlc that unlocked literally all of the the earnable and DLC cars. It seemed completely ridiculous, but this was before cloud saves were common. The devs said they felt if people wanted to jump into multiplayer, didn’t want to grind again, or were simply on a different platform, they could just spend the cash. Considering how hard some of the cars are to get, this made some sense. I remember that I got the dlc. I don’t remember if I bought it or if I somehow had the option after buying the final version, but enabling it was a mistake. The game didn’t have any real progression except for earning the cars.
I played world of tanks for a long time. It’s a PVP game. You can buy gold shells instead of standard, and they have much higher armor penetration and projectile speed with a few drawbacks. Gold is only purchasable with cold hard cash. You can buy them with in game silver instead of gold, but they cost about 10x as much as regular rounds. You have to buy at least some some of them in case you run into a higher tiered enemy and you are low tier due to how the matchmaking works. If you use many of them, even if all of your shots penetrate, you will quickly go negative on silver even if you win and kill a few enemies.
They also have a ton of paid tanks they “overtune” and introduce every patch that cost a ton of cash, like 20 to 50 USD and packs of them for 100+. The devs wait a year or so, usually detune them when they “overperform,” and then introduce new overtuned tanks for the whales to buy. By overtuned I mean almost completely impenetrable from the front even at an angle and load them with higher penetration gold shells as standard. It’s almost impossible to kill a good player driving many them without significant risk and very specific strategies. The players also learn their weaknesses the more they encounter them, so they lose their luster over time unless the driver is very skilled. The tanks are sometimes literally just buffed up versions of base tanks. They also have multipliers that make them generate more exp for the crew and more silver when you bring it into battle, so they can pack more gold rounds and still come out ahead if that particular tank doesn’t have a massively overpowered basic round. The good news is whales are usually bad at the game, so you can often deal with them easily enough, but if you run into a wolfpack or slightly above average players, you’re in serious trouble. Of course there are sales and deals that are timed for the special tanks and there is a season pass that acts as an exp and silver doubler that counts down even when you aren’t playing. The number of purchasable gold tanks is more than the base tanks at this point, I mean, there are hundreds upon hundreds. Some of which are low tier and are incredible easy for someone with experience to stomp half of the enemy team in about a minute and a half. This is pay to win.
Item shops were mainstreamed partly when developers realized there was a huge blackmarket on ebay. Developers couldn’t ignore the insane demand and black market in Everquest 1 and Diablo 2, so they started selling it directly for profit instead of trying to constantly keep ahead of the black market and dupers. WoW also had a huge black market. There is an argument to be had that maybe the drops in Diablo 2 were so rare that it created the market.
The other force at work is aging gamers. Spending 10 bucks or even 20 bucks for a few runes to complete your set makes a hell of a lot more sense than doing 200 runs in Diablo 2 and hoping you can snag your rare item from the shared loot pool with a .03% drop rate. For a grown adult, rare content and builds are essentially content they will never have access to. A lot of the end game Everquest 1 and Diablo 2 content was exclusively for people that didn’t work for a living or wanted to spend a literal decade farming for. In Everquest 1, everything took forever, and you could chain die and delevel too. If people wanted a new class, they would pay to power level or just buy a character outright.
Funny story I think I heard on the old giant bombcast. This dev gave his young son matchbox cars and he noticed the kid had a few of them set off on a ledge and he wasn’t playing with them. He asked his kid why they were there and the kid said that they were unlocked later if he paid for them. This is embedded in the young’s mobile game brains.
Anyway, the insane outrage over reasonably priced earnable items in game is hilarious to me. People are throwing “predatory” around right now like they threw “hero” around during covid. Maybe they should throw “budget,” “self-control,” and “boycott” around a little more often. But we can’t actually stop using things we pretend to abhor, can we?