What gamers want?
Gamers want everything, nothing, or both depending which way you turn it.
Any individual gamer only want a few things, and has things they definitely do not want.
Fx enough gamers wanted Eve Online to have 500k paid accounts. But a lot of them did not want Fozzy Sov and P2W, more so than that they did want Eve Online. So they left when they could not have Eve Online without.
There are people that like P2W because it makes it easy to win. Just like they want any game that makes them able to just grief others and call it PvP. Fx level 80 arena players running around butchering level 15 newbies in WoW. Or Eve Players wardeccing miners (back when you could), or using vast armies of neut alts for duels and suspect baiting (also changed),
Now level 80 vs level 15 is a difference most can understand, so hard to brag with. Neut alts not showing up on kill mails was perfect. P2W is more fuzzy, but arguments such as everyone has the same options are good.
But they all have one thing in common, they need a lot of victims for each person that enjoys it, so generally bad for the game they are put in, for that reason alone (there are also other reasons for P2W to be bad). But do gamers want P2W? Absolutely yes.
Do most gamers want P2W? Does not seem so.
Another aspect is devs that have lost half their steady monthly income, to being stupid enough to fall in P2W trap. They are very eager for P2W to do better - because they need to make up for the loss. So they will promote P2W items a lot, and focus nearly all their time on developing P2W things, or mechanics that make the P2W items more important.
People suffering from ludomania are also easy victims for P2W lootboxes etc. If they really want it though, is hard to answer. Obviously they have an emotional immediate vast desire, but can they in general mentally realize it is bad for them? I know some can at least after the fact, not sure if its a general thing.
But to sum it all up, the title shows a big problem. Companies always want all the gamers, they can not have that (unless they make many very different games), and ruin their games trying to drag in more players, ignorant of the game being how it is, is why they have the players they do have, and changes that attract other types of players, will drive out existing players.
So asking what all gamers want, is not a good question, it doesn’t even matter. In this case the questions that matters are “What do the people still playing Eve want?” and “Can this change attract nearly as many players as we already have at once? So it doesn’t matter we make a lot of them leave if we implement it.”.
