10 Most Desperate Ways Video Games Got You To Play

There's perhaps no simpler way to entice someone to play a video game than telling them that they don't need to pay a penny to do so.

As such the free-to-play movement has flourished in recent years, with publishers realising the lucrative potential of luring players in with no upfront fee, before charging them for all the extra stuff.

Now, some games handle this much better than others - there are many great free-to-play games like Fortnite, Apex Legends, Warframe, and so on, that don't design their gameplay in an excessively predatory or exploitative way.

But there are so many more that do the absolute bare minimum to hook addiction-prone players, and then attempt to milk them for every possible buck through pay-to-win mechanics, heavily incentivising them to part with their real-world cash for a superior experience.

The most recent F2P disaster was Konami's eFootball 2022, which launched in an extremely compromised state, all while Konami busily shilled expensive "premium DLC" packs to anyone with a functioning pair of eyeballs.

Publishers are well aware that most players won't fall for these tactics, so they're always after the "whales" - a dehumanising term the industry uses for big-money power users who will drop thousands of dollars on a game, possibly while hopelessly addicted to it.

The desperation in the F2P market is palpable, because why bother making an artistic game people will gladly shell out top dollar for when you can just exploit people's addictive tendencies for far less effort instead?