10 Manipulative Gaming Tactics You Fall For Every Time

There's been considerable pushback against publishers in recent years who litter their games with microtransactions right out of the box, and so it's been a cause for celebration when a game releases with the promise of no such nonsense at launch.

But as has become clear as of late, for many games this is nothing more than PR lip service, with publishers ultimately plugging microtransactions in a few weeks later after all the positive reviews have dropped and people have decided to buy the game.

Take Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, which saw Activision add MTX to the game a month after release despite initially promising it would have no such feature.

In recent times the Call of Duty series has also done this, while Fallout 76 initially promised its microtransactions wouldn't be pay-to-win, only for more recent updates to contradict that.

Hell, after reviewers criticised EA for Star Wars: Battlefront II's microtransaction implementation, many publishers simply decided to hide these costs from critics playing in the pre-release period, because screw transparency, right?

Ultimately, if a game seems monetisable, it almost certainly will be, and even if the publisher claims the game won't ever get loot boxes or other money-spinning tosh, you're best taking their comments with a truckload of salt.