10 Clever Ways Developers Make You Addicted To Video Games

3. Making The First Taste Free

If there was one thing I knew as a young gamer, it's that the majority of free video games were free because they were awful. After all, if the game was really good, wouldn't the developers have charged money for it?

While that may have once been the case, modern developers have discovered - much as drug dealers discovered long ago - that the best way to get someone hooked on an addictive substance is to make that first taste free.

While a free video game was universally considered to be a relatively harmless, if not necessarily an entertaining prospect just a few years ago, today the addictive - and sometimes exploitative - nature of these titles has turned "free-to-play" into a bad word among certain sections of the gaming community.

Say what you will about these free titles, but the reason you see so many of them is because they work.