YES

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Sunday, March 03, 2013, 07:51 (4287 days ago) @ Claude Errera

Again - it means nothing of the sort. There are times I will go to a restaurant and order something I am perfectly capable of preparing for myself. I will pay much, much, MUCH more for the restaurant dish than I would pay for the version I built at home - and yet, I will not be unhappy with the situation. I am not choosing to go to a restaurant because preparing the meal personally is unpleasant enough to pay to avoid - there are a myriad of reasons I might be doing this, and many of them don't even take into account the comparison!

I can think of many reasons to pay for a meal at a restaurant:

1. The chef is excellent and the food is otherwise better than you can prepare.
2. You don't feel like cooking tonight
3. You wish to join friends in a place with some charm / atmosphere

2 would be like game microtransactions under the pay to avoid playing model, but 1 and 3 are added value that are worth paying for because you can't get them at home. I can think of no instances in which pay to avoid playing microtransactions in games add value in this way, and if you could come up with some examples I'd be curious.