10 Manipulative Gaming Tactics You Fall For Every Time

As much as we all love video games, it's important to remember that the gaming industry is a business first and foremost, with publishers' primary occupation being to part you with as much of your hard-earned money as humanly possible.

And so, the industry as a whole has developed a wide range of tricks to manipulate gamers - aka "consumers" - into throwing cash their way. And because we simply can't help ourselves, most of us end up falling prey to these deceptive practises again and again, year after year.

As companies continue to prove, there are few lows to which they won't stoop in order to turn a profit, exploiting the psychological vulnerabilities of players to milk them for every available penny.

However, this isn't to completely ignore the notion of personal responsibility, that it's important for us all to step back and appreciate just how laser-focused companies are on making money.

But it's also fair to say that the purveyors of our entertainment perhaps shouldn't be trying to rip money from our wallets quite this aggressively - at least not without sufficient regulation...

One of the gaming industry's oldest tricks is to lure potential customers in with misleading "target gameplay" and screenshots (or rather, "bullshots") which ultimately aren't representative of what the final game actually look likes.

The most infamous example in the last generation was unquestionably Watch Dogs, which ended up receiving a substantial visual downgrade from its original E3 demo, much to players' disappointment.

Before that, we had Killzone 2's PS3 "tech demo," which wasn't even in-engine but rather a rendered video intended to approximate what the team at Guerrilla Games was aiming for.

In recent years, it turned out that this was originally an internal video never meant to be released outside of Sony, but once the marketing bods feasted their eyes upon it, they actively attempted to manipulate players into believing those visuals were a realistic prospect on PS3.

And today developers still get away with over-promising a visual experience which isn't actually feasible on existing hardware, hiding their deception under the guise of unexpected technical challenges which arise during development.

To be clear, always be skeptical of early gameplay footage, because it so rarely represents the vision that ends up on our screens.