15 Video Games Made To Sell You Products
If you thought watching an advert was bad, try playing one.
Companies will do anything to make you buy their products, so it makes sense that some titles have obvious products placement. Final Fantasy XV has an entire mission dedicated to how great Cup Noodles are, Alan Wake loves to use Energizer batteries, and in the world of Crazy Taxi everyone loves Pizza Hut.
Some of these are a bit intrusive, but game development is hard and unpredictable - maybe we can forgive studios for wanting to make a tiny bit more money for their troubles?
That and who knows, maybe without the cash of these companies, some games might not have had the funding to get made at all.
What's less forgivable though, is when a game is just one big advert. A company hiring an inexperienced game developer to create something completely dedicated to their product.
Most of the time these are low-quality experiences that are more focused on trying to make you buy something than offering a fun time.
Stunts like this are going to do the complete opposite of what they set out to do. After playing a frustrating broken mess of a game, are you really going to want the product associated with it?
15. Smarties: Meltdown - Smarties
How do you make a game based on Smarties?
There isn't really a Smarties mascot to star in their own video game, and the worlds presented in the Smarties adverts aren't exactly begging to be explored.
At least with something like Ronald McDonald or the M&M characters you could see a kid getting attached and wanting to play something featuring them. Not even the weirdest kid would want to explore the Smarties world.
So they have no world, no character, and nobody who would even play the game. That normally stops a game from being made yet Smarties were determined to make something to take up shelf space so we got Smarties: Meltdown.
In this game you play as a Smartie called Big Blue who must explore the Smarties factory to rescue the rest of his kind and defeat the evil Dr. Soursweet.
Since the Smarties factory setting doesn't need to be realistic you think they'd make it a colourful location to make their chocolates appear magical. Nope, they set it in a grey metallic building which is so boring that it's probably just modelled after a real-life factory.
It's in space but that is so irrelevant to how the game looks that it's barely worth mentioning.