The general gaming community wants to sink money into MMOs and play call of duty slop. The majority is fine with subscriptions and battle passes. They use terms like bullet sponging. You’ll never ever make them happy.

However, there are the minoritiew, the fans that just want good well thought out games, that don’t need every mechanic, that are slightly addicting and just fun to play. The ones who think like you, focus on them.

I frequently go back to satisfactory and factorio. Factorio started as a small thing that they wanted to build, was crowd funded by people who wanted it, and big studios ignored because “the majority of gamers would never enjoy this”. Try didn’t care, they didn’t want the majority audience, and by focusing on what they cared about they literally created the factory building genre. Their drive them spawned my favorite game satisfactory, another game that the industry didn’t really believe in, and now it sits towards the top of the charts. Ignore the haters, ignore the majority. Focus on what you want to build.