They don’t have to compete, palworld offered little resistance or trouble for them. You are comparing 3m sales of a base game to 30m. The only thing they might consider is either adding more functionality in game (which is good) but still based on Arceus, I doubt art or optimization and graphics will be of importance.
You can’t join into multiplayer/gta online unless you disable all mods. For a live service that needs loading Individually it still doesn’t operate as good as it should especially when they have the funds for it. They dont care for the player experience. After 4 times having to enable, test and disable mods just to play online with friends, I dropped gta V all together. Wasn’t worth co figuring 150+ mods just to have them all break when you have to disable them.
I was throwing out a nuclear option showing that there are options. This is valve where best of the best work here, and implementing locked down trading can work to thr point they cut out the external trades or make it so hard to move the trade of thr platform that it would effectively kill the casino portion. Albeit this would hurt their earnings.