They were not always free, and when they were, they were up to a limit. Yes the limit was something absurd, but surprisingly, some people did hit them.
That's why as soon as phones had easy access to the web and enough bandwidth to last a month, people started treating SMS like a last resort, and I have not met a single culture on Earth that didn't think this way in the transition period up to when what you said became universally true.
Plus... People don't want to message only their "contacts", nor want their phone address book filled with trash. Mindblowing, know, who would have thought (other than US apple users????). Facebook's Messenger was one of the earliest to give that to the wide public and it got heavily adopted. But people moved on from even that.
Teams isn't JUST a Slack ripoff. It's a Slack spinoff, to the point they share assets in AppData.
Which means that if you install both and then uninstall one or the other... well... let's just say I spent a while on manual cleanup and then never reinstalled either.
You start with a large shape made of cubes and have to remove or paint those cubes to reveal the object within. This object is not only made of cubes, but rather, is a mix of solid shapes and the paint is what you use to set on the final piece, just like regular piccross.
Due to the added dimension, the regular picross rules wouldn't really work (too much info would be given and the game would be trivial), so they reformulated it a bit. You still get hints for whole rows and columns. But instead, you have two paint colors isn't of just one.
Blue paints will apply to cubes that are the full cube shape in the final object. These are often inside of the object. Orange paint will apply to cubes that become a subshape. Hints on the sides will only have two numbers, a blue and an orange one, and that number says how many of each color is in that row.
If you have a row of 3 three white blocks and the side has a blue 3, you know you can paint it blue all the way.
Two numbers is weird if you come from picross where rows can have like strings of 7 numbers signifying separate groups of pixels. But it's enough. Because the numbers can have two more hints.
A simple number means all painted cubes of that color are grouped together. If your white row of has a blue 2, then you know the middle cube has to be blue so they stick together.
If a number has a circle around it, then the cubes will be spread in two groups. For example, if the row of 3 white cubes has 1 blue and a circle orange 2, then you know the order of cubes in that row is orange-blue-orange.
If the number is surrounded by a square, the the painted cubes are in 3 or more separate groups. If you have a row of 5 white cubes and a squared blue 3, then you know the painted cubes are off the sides and in the middle.
Besides this, the game also gives you a cross section tool so you can see inside the shapes. Without it, you wouldn't be able to paint the inner parts of a big object, and it helps with focusing rows or columns.
What I really like about the game is that you can much more frequently see patterns in the objects. Like, if you recognize you're building a train, you can sometimes complete it by shape rather than by paint rules. This is true of picross pixel art, but I find it a much more likely occurrence with 3D objects and it makes me happy when it happens.
Tetris also had a ton of aggro strategizing and timings. Top players weren't playing Tetris anymore, they were playing duels. And Mario had a couple stupid way to cheese matches.
It's really only Pacman that felt like it didn't have depth.
No 3D required, BUUUT, I found it super comfortable to play with the left hand switching between the blue/orange markers while holding the whole thing at the same time. It was a game where a half controller + half stylus input method worked to make it a better couch experience. That feeling may be lost a bit in on PC, but what the hell, people have mouse buttons, those might work to replicate the ease, and I dunno, does the steam deck and its sisters have touch screens? Nothing can really ruin the game.
I will never, ever, understand why Stadia was something thay had to be "ported into" at such high cost. Specially for games that were ALREADY working on Linux. Like, what the fuck was the hold up. I read up stories that it was basically like porting to a fourth console and that just sounded outrageously stupid in my head.
Whatever tech stack they had, they could have made it way more profitable by making it generic windows boxes that partially run your library elsewhere. I dunno if there's some hubris or some licensing bullshit behind it, but fact is, if I want to do this on GeForce Now, I can do it, no questions asked, and as the costumer, that's the beginning and end of my concerns.
And honestly, my biggest mindblow was finding out Piccross 3D was not made by Jupiter, but rather, by Hal Laboratory. That means two unfortunate things. One: I'm never getting another one of the best version of Picross, since those people love to do their thing. Two: I am not really invested into making these PC releases work out anymore.
Pokemon even has another wiki that's almost entirely dedicated to game data, Serebii, and yes, the design is dated, and yes, it is also the most accurate and concise source of knowledge for the series.
Man this was an issue already some 10 years ago when touhou wiki went self-hosted. It took a whole year for google to get memo and link the new one above the old.
Nowadays I assume it's pretty much impossible to reverse the flow unless if your game is huge and highly sought after.
They were not always free, and when they were, they were up to a limit. Yes the limit was something absurd, but surprisingly, some people did hit them.
That's why as soon as phones had easy access to the web and enough bandwidth to last a month, people started treating SMS like a last resort, and I have not met a single culture on Earth that didn't think this way in the transition period up to when what you said became universally true.
Plus... People don't want to message only their "contacts", nor want their phone address book filled with trash. Mindblowing, know, who would have thought (other than US apple users????). Facebook's Messenger was one of the earliest to give that to the wide public and it got heavily adopted. But people moved on from even that.