I'll say it again. I don't mind people charging for things. I get it. You gotta pay the bills, we live in a world where you can't exist without money. I have no issues with them charging money for it, and I more than appreciate the abundance of free art that's readily available. But I will say this. On here, on Nutaku, and with just a simple Google search, there is near infinite free art of whatever you'd like, everything and anything you can think of and if it doesn't exist yet, it can in seconds using AI.
Not once did I say I DESERVED any of it. I don't. And I know that I don't. And in the same vain, the creator of this game does not DESERVE any money they're making off of it, because the concept of deserving something in itself is entitled and self-righteous. But you're right, I do have standards, and this game, as it stands, doesn't live up to them. If people have lower standards, that's fine, if your standards are so low that you're willing to pay the paywall, that's cool too, I have nothing against that whatsoever. But what I will say is that thanks to that abundance of free art, a lot of it is better than this game. Not most, this game is incredible, which is why I criticized it for having a paywall. I think this game has incredible potential, but I feel it won't live up to it with its current model. As it stands, eventually, it'll plateu. Everyone who would buy it will have, and the dev will eventually have to stop supporting the game due to that.
I call scummy tactics because it is scummy to put up a paywall. Again, Activision learned that the hard way. Now as I said, I've been fairly harsh, but that's because I enjoy this game, and I would genuinely like to see it prosper. I won't criticize something I don't care about.
My recommendations were laid out. A Patreon early access model, which most artists of this nature follow, will give it a consistent stream of income rather than one that falls off. A voluntary ad system will not only give the players options other than paying to support the creator, because living is too expensive for me to pay for this kind of thing but by god would I love to support the dev regardless, but it'll also give the developer yet another consistent stream of income. There are ways to monetize a game outside of a paywall, and I feel that many companies and developers should take note.
Alternatively, again, he could just properly label the Demo and Standard versions and I couldn't care less about the paywall. If wanting to download a game labeled the standard edition of the game and get the full content of the base game is "asking for a life full of bitter disappointment" then I suppose that is exactly what I'm doing.