7 Video Game Achievements You Had To PAY For

Paying to get ahead.

the culling
Xaviant

There's something truly special about video game achievements.

Hearing that sweet chime as you pop one for completing a tough gameplay section or finally felling a ferocious boss scratches that itch deep within our little reptile brain, in a manner that feels comforting and satisfying, likely to make us want to pursue this feeling, along with bragging rights, further and further in our favorite titles.

It's basically an e-drug that forms a relationship of being rewarded for completing actions, or by playing games extremely well. Achievements keep players invested in a title as they feel motivated to really knuckle down and pull off some insane manoeuvres in the pursuit of pixellated prizes.

However, some video games take one look at this delicate balance between gamer and gamerscore and muse out loud "But what if you could just buy this feeling?", and thus we have the examples that make up this list.

These are games that don't just ask for time investments in order to unlock their trophies, but also ones from your wallet in order to grease the palms.

It's grim. It's ugly. It's quite likely the future of gaming (cool)

7. Pony Up - Red Dead Redemption 2

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Rockstar

Now to be clear, the "Pony Up" achievement which is unlocked by the player spending over $50,000 in the outstanding Red Dead Redemption 2 is but one of many "spend X to unlock Y" trophies that crop up time and time again in gaming, but I figured I'd include it for two big reasons.

The first is because $50,000 sure is a hell of a lot of money in a game where the average consumable might cost as little as a dollar, and where gold bars, the most valuable and hard to come by currency in the game, are only worth $500 each. So you better pack a lunch because you're going to be treasure hunting for a fair old while.

The second reason is that when this article gets made into a video at least the footage of Red Dead Redemption 2 is usually more entertaining than just watching video game protagonists standing around in shops.

This is an achievement that doesn't really take any skill to unlock, just a huge amount of time, item farming, and good old fashioned capitalism in order to unlock, and while we're grateful that Rockstar didn't let people just use the microtransaction gold bars that they sell in Red Dead Redemption Online to pop this, don't be surprised if this one achievement ends up costing you a lot of your free time.

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Jules Gill hasn't written a bio just yet, but if they had... it would appear here.