10 Most Desperate Ways Video Games Got You To Play
Video games will pander to your basest instincts whenever possible.
The video game industry is now bigger and more lucrative than it's ever been, registering global revenue upwards of $180 billion last year, far outpacing the profits generated by Hollywood.
While in an ideal world publishers would need do nothing more than release a quality game to ensure commercial success, that simply isn't the reality.
So much more goes into making a successful game, and evidently many publishers will do whatever it takes to prize money from your wallet.
The games industry has proven time and time again that it's unafraid to look desperate in the pursuit of huge profits, employing every dirty trick in the book to get players "engaged" and fuel the gargantuan money-printing machine that is the modern games business.
While many of these tricks aren't inherently bad, the fact is that each is open to abuse and manipulation, and if the history of the world has taught us anything, it's that well-minted corporations will run good faith into the ground in record time while chasing record-setting revenue.
And so, these are the most icky, desperate, and shameless (or shameful?) ways video games have convinced you to play...
10. "Bullshots" & Misleading Trailers
Perhaps the single most nefarious way that a desperate publisher can try and entice you to play their game is to straight-up lie about it - or if we're going to be polite (which we're not), "mislead."
"Bullshots" are a term for promotional images and trailers for a game which aren't in fact representative of its final release quality.
In extreme cases this might be something like the infamous Killzone 2 E3 2005 trailer, which was actually a target render intended for internal use only, but ended up being used to sell both the game and the power of the PS3 - absolutely inaccurately, of course.
Ubisoft was also memorably dragged for the final versions of Watch Dogs and The Division, which were severely visually downgraded from their original gameplay demos.
In rarer cases developers might even straight-up mislead the public about the content of their game, like Hello Games over-promising what No Man's Sky would offer out of the box.
Whether the marketing has overstated a game's graphical or gameplay merits, the result is almost always the same: frustration from players who feel they've been duped into spending cash on an experience different from the one advertised.