10 Most Insulting Kinds Of Video Game DLC

1. Horse Armour

While microtransactions and DLC have evolved and changed a lot over their multiple decades in video games, some things remain the same.

In this case, that’s horse armour.

This entry will seem a touch weirdly specific compared to our other entries but bear with me. For the uninitiated, horse armour is the insidious penny-pinching microtransaction that really got insidious DLC packs off the ground. When Bethesda asked you to pay $2 to get armour for your horse in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, a thousand memes launched, dollar signs appeared in the eyes of video game corpos everywhere, and the games industry would fundamentally change forever. Though this 2006 example has remained an infamous icon of truly insidious poorly valued DLC, it’s worth pointing out that we’re now in 2023 and what can you buy?

That’s right. Horse armour. In Diablo IV, one of this year’s biggest games you’re still being tempted with horse armour. But they call it mount armour now.

The shop icon sits permanently at the top of your menu screen with an ever present exclamation point, the tempting cat toy of the RPG player’s world. A quick perusal of the menu suggests horse armour is now going for approximately 10 - 17 Australian Dollars so that $2 horse armour isn’t looking so bad now, is it?

Either that, or inflation has clearly impacted the digital equine equipment industry more than we thought. In any case, in the final entry of shame it goes.