7 Times The Video Game Industry Gave In To Greed

4. The Monetization Of The Annual Release

There are certain franchises that have built themselves a legacy off of the back of a yearly release model. You’ve got your sports games, your WWE games and the like, but with these games increasingly taking a rather aggressive approach to monetisation, we’re now getting a rather huge problem.

The approach to Ultimate Teams, to loot boxes, to upgrading your roster all come at a price, and it’s a bill footed by the consumer, as no matter how good your players or superstars are looking come the close of the year, that won’t mean jack when the next game comes out and resets the standings. It’s an exploitation by the developers to make sure you are never able to beat the house, that you are always putting in money to do what is essentially the same thing again and again. It’s a gameplay loop, but one that doesn’t reward time; it only rewards you for a period of time before the clock resets.

And it’s a problem that isn’t going to go away as we’re entering into a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. As these games make more and more money, the more that the licence holders such as FIFA’s clubs will ask for in exchange for likenesses, thereby increasing the amount of predatory practices we will see in future games that are now “required” to keep the company's bottom line out of the red.

This surely isn’t sustainable in the long term and we may end up seeing a collapse of these games' ability to offer likenesses or we might see a complete change in the model they provide. Either way, you can be sure that the consumer isn’t going to be the one that benefits.