To be fair GTA VI is probably not coming to PC this decade.

The manual for the original Elite was literally a novel, well one of the many volumes of printed documentation it came with was

Nah, in the 80s we had hundreds probably thousands of games for the commodore 64 and later the amiga 500, all of them pirated. The piracy scene was huge, and often the games were free as we just copied them from friends

Not really a microtransaction as much as a leasing payment

That only happened extremely rarely. Nowadays it seems to be almost mandatory, precisely because the mindset is that they can just fix it later