There absolutely can be a market like that. We're in a digital utopia where we don't actually own anything. You could even have a cutoff, where playing more doesn't charge you more. Gamers might even accept that, in a weird way. You rent it per hour up to 70 hours, and then you just "own" it.

But I suspect most of his stats show that there's a huge number of people out there who will spend $70 on a game on day one, play it for 10 hours and never touch it again. RDR2 for example has a 30% completion rate on PSN. 31% didn't even finish the first chapter. And he certainly doesn't want to say goodbye to that money.

I don't want a market like that because it will lead to even more time-wasting and busywork in games than there already is. But maybe that would backfire. If you played 10 hours of a game and it was mostly trudging about doing nothing, would you pay to play more of it?

there simply cannot be a pricing model like that

Microtransactions? Battle passes? Episodic releases? Is the guy purposefully playing dumb?

I'm still not going to buy games at $70. I don't care enough about their BS to pay that much.

Plenty of great games in the $20 to $30 market all day long. I've put a few hundred hours into a handful of games that were that cheap over the last few months and have bought zero $50+ games. [EDIT: I did buy Zelda TOTK for $50, correction]

For example, I would like to buy Armored Core 6 but I'm not going to pay the "discounted" price of $53 that it's available at now. I can wait until it's further discounted, while I play lots of other games that I already have.

This is Lemmy, nobody reads the article. They just react to the headline they know is cherry picked and find a way to work it into whatever circlejerk suits their fancy.