Granted, the "nickel and diming" of hotline numbers (1900, 0900, etc) was nowhere as bad as today's cash shops, but a lot of us simply forgot they were always hungry for all our money
Here's a bunch other hotline ads for you to peruse - https://www.retromags.com/gallery/category/1729-telephone-hotlines/
PS: I never understood these american numbers that used letters, how were you supposed to know what was the actual number?
I wouldnt call this nickle and diming.
I would call this a desperate life line in a world before the internet.
I spent a week smashing my head against a problem in a SNES game before giving up and calling the Nintendo Hotline. Which gave me the the solution to my problem, and did it relatively quickly and without much wasted time.. Which I found amazing, and always wondered how they had that information in the era before Gamefaqs.
The Nintendo Hotline was fantastic for me, because I lived close enough to Nintendo's US offices that the number wasn't long distance... and it wasn't a 900 number, so it never cost more than a regular phone call. I got all the hints I needed for free.
What game was that, by the way? Because I immediately think every hotline worked the same: company makes one or two parts stupidly difficult to get through just so a few will end up calling. Sierra On-line's adventure games were notorious for their pants-on-head logic and hidden shit.