The "monopoly money" perspective isn't wrong, and in general an ICO for a coin that's, say, "bitcoin but a little different" doesn't make much sense. Bitcoin is supposed to be a currency, so an ICO for something bitcoin-ish is like taking investments for a new kind of dollar. You have to get them into circulation somehow, and trading currencies like commodities is a real thing, but it doesn't really explain the current ICO hype.
It makes more sense if you look at most of the ICO tokens from the ethereum point of view, rather than bitcoin. Ethereum and its derivatives let you use tokens as components of distributed applications. Unlike a "pure" currency, which is useful only as a medium of exchange and has no intrinsic value, these tokens let you use the distributed application so they're worth whatever the application is. They aren't really currency, although you can usually buy and sell them and they're used to give the application some kind of market behavior.
Something like filecoin is a better example. The filecoin project intends to build a distributed storage system. If their project succeeds, the filecoin network will let you exchange coins for the network's storage, and storage is valuable so the coins are valuable too. Ideally, they'll use the funding from selling coins in an ICO to make the project so useful that a coin's worth of access will be worth more than what you paid for it during the ICO and the people who participated come out ahead.
Personally I'm still not very impressed with most ICO projects, but at least all of them aren't completely insane when you look at them this way.
An ICO is an "Initial Coin Offering", it's supposed to be like an IPO except instead of offering shares, you're selling cryptocurrency coins. ICOs are usually framed as a way to fund a project or business, usually related to cryptocurrencies or blockchain technology in some way. The idea is that the project's success will increase the value of the coins you bought and you'll be able to sell them for more later.
The main difference is that the coin is just a coin, buying it won't make you a shareholder and you aren't subject to the regulation that IPOs and shareholders are. That regulation makes it difficult to scam investors by starting a dummy company, pretending it's a valuable operation, selling shares in an IPO, and then running away with the money. Doing this with an ICO is much easier, and there's a lot of concern about how many ICOs are frauds.
You make an excellent point here that I don't see articulated very often. The Landscape of Popular Languages, let's say C/C++/Java/Python/Ruby/JavaScript, has a big gap in the middle. You have good choices between:
1. lower level "systems" oriented languages with static types, usually compiled, like C++. You get lots of flexibility and direct access to primitives. Static types help wrangle big codebases. Generally suited to large projects.
2. higher level "scripting" oriented languages with dynamic types, usually interpreted, like Python. Writing code for most tasks is easier. You give up some stuff you'd want for projects like operating systems or databases. Most projects aren't operating systems or databases, so that's usually a good tradeoff. Generally suited to small projects.
The problem is that lots of projects are medium-ish. You set out to build your web service backend or whatever, it would be a pain in the ass to write in C++, so you use Python. Getting it working is quick and easy. A few months later it's big, complex piece of software and working on it in Python is a pain in the ass. You can't win. What you really wanted was a language that's "easy to write" like Python, but with static or optional types, maybe better thread handling, and at this point the interpreter isn't doing much for you so it might as well be compiled. There are tons of cases where you just want a "better C" or "Python but faster and with static types", and for the longest time the Landscape of Popular Languages just had a giant hole there.
We needed that space filled and Go delivered. I'm usually very critical of Go, but I can't hate on it for being the wrong kind of language. It's definitely the right kind of language for these "goldilocks" problems that aren't too high or too low level, too big or too small. Part of being a good programmer is understanding that languages are tools, and you need to pick one that fits your problem. Go deserves all the success and praise it's gotten for being a language that fits actual problems.
>it's the feeling that could produce this response that they should be optimizing for
As near as I can tell, this is exactly how Apple got to be Apple and they already know how it's done. When people I know who have owned non-recent macs describe them, it's like they're having some kind of profound emotional experience. They don't even talk about it like it's a computer. I've never heard them say things like "having all the applications go to the blue 'Applications' icon on the dock is great," even though that's a useful feature they seem to understand and enjoy using, they say "it's so easy to find things" or "it just works". I know a longtime OSX user who is particularly detail-oriented and I asked him why he liked working with Sprinter vans[1] as opposed to trucks. He explained that they handled more like big cars than trucks, which is handy for maneuvering in cities and backing into cramped loading docks. He had no problem discussing his preference in detail without any prompting, the same way I'll tell anyone who asks that I like headset microphones to desktop ones because it's one fewer peripheral to manage and I have my desk laid out just right. When he talks about his Apple products being good, he just says they "work."
So clearly they've succeeded in the past at giving people things that they really really like. They like them so much that they don't even dwell on the specific things that make them so likeable. I've never made anyone like anything that much in my life, and if I had a process for it I can't imagine why I'd stop.
>An interesting example would be Call of Duty: Infinity Warfare.
The differences between the market of people buying console-focused first-person shooters and the one for virtual reality headset systems make this comparison not really work.
Call of Duty was originally a much-beloved FPS series during a time when the genre was dominated by multiplayer games with high skill ceilings and "twitch" or reflex-based mechanics. They catered to the market available to them at the time, which was enthusiast gamers with the hardware required to run 3D video games (and to a lesser extend internet access that could play them online.) Consoles had existed for a while, but they weren't always in the position they are now. CoD 2 was released in late 2005, the Xbox 360 was released right around the same time, and the PS3 wouldn't come out until the next year. Internet multiplayer has been a reality on the PC since the 90's but Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network didn't even exist until the early 2000's. Halo: Combat Evolved on the original Xbox famously didn't support internet multiplayer, but its PC version did.
By this point it's obvious that the numbers in gaming are shifting. The relatively low sticker price of a gaming console means you don't have to work with the segment of the population who have enthusiast-grade computers. Pretty much anyone can afford to buy an Xbox 360. Crucially, the expense of console gaming isn't frontloaded. The most expensive part of being in the PC gaming segment was (and still is) either buying a bunch of components and assembling yourself, or spending even more for a prebuilt. Assembling computer parts is actually not that hard, but not assembling computer parts is even easier, and you can walk out of any department store with a home console for a few hundred dollars. You'll spend more than that over time from subscriptions, peripherals, more expensive games, etc., but you won't have to spend a grand up front just to start playing.
Call of Duty's publisher, Activision, observed that this new pie is titanic compared to the old one and decided to focus on grabbing a slice of it. There's now a market available to them that's way bigger, will pay the same amount of money for the disk, and doesn't necessarily need things like a dedicated server with admin features. Their new approach of releasing titles on a more annual schedule for this market works because it's substantially larger.
On the VR side of things, an HTC Vive costs eight hundred dollars. The Oculus Rift, which is just the headset and has no hand controllers or "room scale" features like the Vive, will still run you $599. Its "Touch" hand controllers became available only recently and buying those will send you up to the same price point as the Vive. Keep your wallet out, because VR applications require high end GPUs with as much memory as possible, like the Nvidia GTX 1060, which is likely to run you $270 or more. Today's virtual reality options are restricted to dedicated enthusiasts with expendable income to a much greater extent than early Call of Duty games were. Aiming for a market other than "VR enthusiasts" is senseless, there is no other market.
There are VR products that aren't quite so ludicrously expensive, like the Gear VR that uses a phone, but my experience is that they have very little to offer and casual consumers aren't going to line up to buy games for them.
It makes more sense if you look at most of the ICO tokens from the ethereum point of view, rather than bitcoin. Ethereum and its derivatives let you use tokens as components of distributed applications. Unlike a "pure" currency, which is useful only as a medium of exchange and has no intrinsic value, these tokens let you use the distributed application so they're worth whatever the application is. They aren't really currency, although you can usually buy and sell them and they're used to give the application some kind of market behavior.
Something like filecoin is a better example. The filecoin project intends to build a distributed storage system. If their project succeeds, the filecoin network will let you exchange coins for the network's storage, and storage is valuable so the coins are valuable too. Ideally, they'll use the funding from selling coins in an ICO to make the project so useful that a coin's worth of access will be worth more than what you paid for it during the ICO and the people who participated come out ahead.
Personally I'm still not very impressed with most ICO projects, but at least all of them aren't completely insane when you look at them this way.