7 Times The Video Game Industry Gave In To Greed

3. Coin-grabbing Difficulty

Now here’s an interesting entry, as without this pursuit of greed we might not have an entire industry of game design study and development. It's worth remembering that the very origin of the business stems from raking in as many coins as possible.

And it all boils down to a group of people designing a game who at one point must have stated, “yeah, but why would we want the player to finish this game in one run?”, and in that moment the concept of lives, continues and difficulty curves were given a whole new feel.

One need only look back at the heyday of arcade gaming to see countless examples of artificially inflated difficulty spikes, designed solely to make players pop in a few more quarters. They weren’t subtle about it either, with some extreme cases pretty much becoming unwinnable scenarios. And yet, unlike nearly every other product in existence, players still flocked to the cabinet, because it became a feat to beat the game no matter the cost.

In one fell swoop the arcades had ushered in a rigged system that demanded payments to see through to completion, and was somehow thanked for it. This has gone on to influence game design in so many forms with boss creation being amongst the more prominent. When you think about it, you can almost see how much it’s going to cost you to beat these end of stage bosses in lives and continues floating above their heads.