10 Most Desperate Ways Video Games Got You To Play
1. If All Else Fails, Sex Sells
But the oldest adage of them all, and one that will likely never not be true as long as humans remain sexual beings, is that sex sells. Like, a lot.
Gaming has certainly come a long way in recent years in moving away from the excessively sexualised marketing tactics of decades past, but it's still fair to say that many games are sold on the presence of a scantily clad individual - let's be honest, usually a woman.
To be blunt, let's just say that the Dead or Alive Xtreme games weren't shifting units because of their admittedly surprisingly robust volleyball gameplay.
We all remember the blatant fan-service in the earlier Tomb Raider games, and in a most extreme example, the cynically over-sexualised, nudity-filled sports game BMX XXX.
More recently, Final Fantasy XV made side character Cindy a comically over-sexed object of player lust, and Soulcalibur VI offers up an Ivy so impractically clothed as to basically be self-parody.
There's nothing inherently wrong with sexualised characters, male or female, though it's easy to become jaded when it feels like publishers are using sex to desperately pander to your basest instincts and desires, when they consider you as single-minded as a horny teenager.
It's easy to become suspicious that this is a fleshy smoke-screen to distract from the fact the game itself is lacking in the gameplay or story department.
Yet sex continues to sell games by the bucket-load and probably always will, while the debate about what's sex-positive and what's exploitation rages on.