Intentionally extending playtime. Add mins to everything, multiplied by millions, soon adds up & looks good to investors

Sad but it's facts...the game is not the product..we are

I remember reading a Reddit post in like 2015 were a dev who'd just left spilled the beans. He revealed an upcoming patch & said it was being done to make current players work harder, to make up the lost overall hours of people who'd left as they had to hit projected hours or else. The changes were subtle but clever. They removed the weekly nightfall 25% xp buff for vendors, they increased vendor rep to rank up from 2500 to 3000, and grinding vendors for packages was 1 of the only real grinds back then, so this extended playtime by a lot. There was a few other bits I forget but 1 was adding a material farm step to exotic swords quests which meant each player took around 2 hours per sword farming rng planetary materials. This step was originally in the quest but they changed it just before release. There's another little snippet, I don't know if it's all studios but by all accounts Devs bonuses go off how many hours the content they worked on, gets played, certain targets give certain bonuses. Now look at things like the destiny 2 base campaign having no sparrow until you finish the story, & the time you wasted walking from zone to zone. Or the random quests were it spawns you 2 zones away from the quest start point. Or beyond light not having a load zone in the furthest zone away. They've been pulling this stuff for a decade, I guess everyone does it I just wish I didn't know lol.