Those are two different situations.

There isn’t enough paying for shit that’s gonna make a mod run in an unmodified console. You can find people who have bought every single Pokémon game ever, and they still want to play romhacks and randomizers and such.

There’s something to be said about how willing people are to pay and whether they admit it or why. But sounds more like you don’t want to believe there’s any other reason to do it.

A lot of people resort to emulation simply so they can play mods too.

Just because we don’t usually see backlash it doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. The average player puts up with absolutely rigged games which treat paying for advantages as fairness.

Personally I only see cheating as a problem if it affects people who haven’t agreed to it, but the solution is not preventing all modification. Games are better off for modding and customization. They could cut off modified games from having matchmaking or any input on a global game mode while still allowing players to run their own servers however they want.

I’m also a progression-driven player yet I’m suspicious of a game that introduces anti-cheats alongside microtransactions. When microtransactions are involved, the pace of progression tends to be affected to incentive people to pay, and at that point I’d rather play in a hacked server that has a more reasonable progression.

If it was just about letting the player maintain the pace of progression however is most satisfying, I’m sure there are better ways to do that client-side. But these days game companies are all too happy to equivocate “company controlled” with “fair” or “fun”, and it’s curious that in this framing nothing is unfair as long as they get money.

Yeah, there is some hope for as long as Valve isn’t publicly traded. It’s investors that push companies to care only for short term gains.

Valve is not saintly, they have their own sketchy aspects like how they profit over that cosmetics trading market, but releasing the Steam Deck shows they are still thinking of the long term future of PC gaming.

They probably already do.

It’s reductionist, but it gets to the point that it’s not an abstract everlasting resource, it’s a system that’s not under your control, so it might not be always reliable. So people should be wary of service discontinuations, rules and price changes.

The point can be distilled even further, the cloud is someone else’s.