Soulslikes are very popular. We watched the genre explode ourselves.
I don’t like GaaS, you probably know that by now. But I don’t see anything wrong with it giving free access to players. There are plenty of genres that are geat. Racing games, Shooters, sports games could probably do it easy.
But the soulslike genre in particular, the true legends of it, are not the GaaS games. Thats why FromSoft is still the biggest dog in soulslike, they know what the genre fans want. I guess Nioh 2 could be considered GaaS with its dailies and all. But I am more specifically referring to the cancerous revolving door of content type of GaaS. That would not serve a soulslike too well imo.