A closer look

If you want to know how effective digital Skinner boxes are, look no further than Azeroth. Game developers quickly realized that creating actual content is expensive, but making the map aggressively large is cheap. By actively forcing players to awkwardly jog across massive, empty continents simply to hand in a basic fetch quest, Blizzard essentially monetized the mundane act of walking, easily padding out thousands of hours to ensure that monthly subscription keeps renewing.