Video games are not too expensive to make

In the AAA space fewer games appear to be coming out however there does appear to be more games coming out in the Indie space (though the majority won't make money), so I think new ideas and innoviations will eventually trickle up, just that the big AAA games won't likely take the risk first (not surprising given the large amounts of money involved), they'll probably see what works , then do their own take on it.

I'd also note that while fewer games are coming out, a game's support are lasting a lot longer and is almost expected at this point i.e MEA no DLC backlash- could anyone have predicted that 5 years ago? It lets developers try new things and learn what works in a DLC, which has less risk then a full new game. This again can drive development and innovation.

I think that it's not that there will be less innovation, more that it will come in new and different ways. I also think that the new stability for jobs that has come about is fantastic. Even in the last few closurers for EA, they absorbed all the Motreal jobs into Motive and tried to find other jobs in other studios for Visceral. It used to be that most developers were let go right away after a game released, whether sucessful or not. A greater increase in job security is not something to be sniffed at and I think it has really been led byt the development of DLCs and microtransactions.

Even if someone provided a reasonable explanation, you would simply dismiss it for for containing logic which goes above and beyond your simplistic logic.

Example :  An unreasonable sum of money extracted from someone or something.   

"Oh, I'm sorry that a company wants to make a profit!"

Meh.   I'm done with you.

Suits me fine. I like arguing with people, but you don't seem to be able to make posts that are coherent enough to actually argue with.

I don't see how it's very relevant here in a market with competition that can undercut you. If a pub doesn't offer appealing games with good value then it's going to hurt them.

They differ by intention. Grind-to-win is often the result of lazy or inept game design. It's hard to come up with an ethical intention, good or evil, that would explain egregious grind-to-win. Maybe PR/marketing value if the dev can boast that the average player spends 100+ hours in the game? Seems pretty tenuous.

Whereas with pay-to-win, it's easy to see that greed is the intention. Players that play competitive games like to win, and if winning is easier by forking over $$$, shut up and take my money. Sure, I could see an argument for that being simple capitalism, providing something people want to buy, but since the need for the "product" was contrived by the structure of the game itself, it becomes shady.

Really? Tell that to Guild Wars 2, who are lining their pockets with cash selling purely cosmetic stuff.

But yeh, ya know, whatever. It's not as much as EA, so EA wins.

Uhhh, yes.  It is.  It is most definitely free to "pay".   

And now I'll take on what you really meant.   Uhhh, yes it is.   It is free to play, excluding the original box cost.  And those purchases are purely cosmetic.   There are no P2W things in the game.

Free to Play games are those where you can play significant amounts of the game without paying. Guild Wars doesn't qualify because to play you need to buy the box set, which is paying and therefore not free.

Free to play (F2P) refers to a business model for online games in which the game designers do not charge the user or player in order to join the game. Instead, they hope to bring in revenue from advertisements or in-game sales, such as payment for upgrades, special abilities, special items, and expansion packs.

www.techopedia.com/definition/27039/free-to-play-f2p

Pay to Win is used often by free to play games (not Guild Wars) because they don't earn any money from people buying the game and they tend to require a stable and reliable stream of income.

Which is 3 years that ArenaNet has been able to rely on revenue from game sales. F2P games (that have always been F2P) often employ P2W because they don't rely on game sales for any period of time.

1 - Profits are declining. You've never actually showed how they've made "shit tons of cash off purely cosmetic shit". Whenever they release an expansion their financials are good but otherwise Guild Wars is in decline.

2 - I have no idea what you're trying to say here. For real (I'm not joking.) 

Guild Wars 2 was the fastest selling MMO in existence (or so they tout.) They sold 5 million boxed copies before going F2P, they sold a shitload of expansion sets (each time causing a giant bump in their financials.) Without these revenue streams coming in, their microtransaction sales by themselves are a little underwhelming.

To put it another way sure, Guild Wars 2 made a shit ton of cash, but it did it on the back of strong game sales as well as their microtransactions. Nowhere have I seen any evidence (not from you either) that gem sales alone pulls in shit tons of cash. It's substantial, but if they were fully F2P I doubt it'd sustain them. If you can show me I'm wrong please do, I'm all for reading posts backed with strong statistics and facts that challenges my worldview.