What is POE's target audience?

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Yet they have micro-t's that only appeal to the Casual gamers. Don't you think that it must be seen as a hypocrisy to use the Casual gamers' cash and work for the Hardcore gamer community?

The microtransactions are cosmetic as an alternative to anything that would constitute "pay to win", which is very appealing to hardcore players. Typically, it's casual games that institute "pay to win" in the form of boosts, upgrades, and so on, for money, so that a casual player can bypass obstacles with money. Or, in its worst form, pay-to-win is designed so that the game is so tedious without paying for those boosts that you kind of have to use them to be competitive or even play the game.

So, at least in theory (and in practice so far, the nearest exception would be stash tabs), GGG preserves the integrity of the game by having cosmetic microtrans instead of pay-to-win.