Every time I hear this defense, I groan.
There is no such thing as 'just cosmetics'. Many RPG's are all about these cosmetics; they are about tweaking your character and making him/her look nice. That makes cosmetics part of the core game content for many RPG's. They are the reward at the end of the road. So to then rip those rewards from the game and lock them behind a pay wall is atrocious.
And you may make the point that they can be bought with whatever ingame currency the game runs with; Atoms, gems, diamonds, gold, goldbars (honestly, I've seen so many variations of this by now, it baffles me people still defend this predatory tactic), and that these currencies can be earned by simply playing the game. But these games are always designed in such a way to make earning the currency through gameplay a complete grind, in order to give the player incentive to buy the currency for real money instead.
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There was a huge fuss about this with Red Dead 2 not so long ago, with items that required ludicrous amounts of currency to buy, to the point where it would take decades for a player to buy the item through just playing the game. It blatantly put the predatory tactic on full display for anyone to see. Heck, we had the same thing with Star Wars Battlefront 2's Darthvader debacle, and EA's silly defense of it. Remember this?
https://kotaku.com/players-are-trying-to-calculate-how-long-it-takes-to-un-1820373111
This happened not that long ago, have you forgotten already?
"It's just cosmetics!" Pffft, don't make me laugh. You are being exploited! Remember when games were not about exploitation, not so long ago? Where you'd play through Soul Blade's entire Edge Master Mode, or try and get an S-rank on Resident Evil, just to unlock special weapons and alternate costumes? You know, games that rewarded you for achieving something, instead of trying to bait you into spending real money at every turn?