10 Biggest Dangers To Gaming Right Now (From A Dev's Perspective)

How DO those wily publishers figure out how to mitigate costs without having to sell twenty-eight million copies? Well, they simply unleash a million moths to eat through your savings, of course, with the teeny-weeny bites they refer to as “microtransactions.”

Only now, with the burden of cost rising to the place where reliance on pure sales isn’t enough, publishers are investing progressively more time and resources into “monetisation design,” which is just a fancy way of saying “how to make players more likely to part with money, and more often, after they’ve bought the base game,” with that meaty $70 price tag you pay being considered more like an entry fee to a club where it costs eleven quid for a Bacardi Breezer.

Additional-transaction shops are becoming so commonplace and obnoxious now that it’s not uncommon to find them bursting out of your game’s title screen, a few inauspicious pop-ups blocking your view for good measure.

But don’t assume this is as far as it can be taken.

Some off-the-cuff remarks and patents filed by big publishing companies could spell disaster for the tight-fisted misers among us, with considerations for in-game billboards being for digital goods purchasable with real-world cash, loading screens harbouring “quick-buy” options, and any number of sneaky ways to get you to drop another couple of doubloons.

All of a sudden horse armour and loot boxes seem so… benign.