8 Video Games That Made You Pay For Essential Features - Commenter Edition

Last year, we wrapped up ten video games that made you pay for essential features, and you guys shared our bafflement so sincerely, that many took to the comments to suggest other games that have done the same thing.

And so, we’ve got another pile of name and shame entries that left us wondering why we were being asked to pay for content that really should have been in the game to begin with. Whether it was a content addition or features that were present previously in the series then later taken out, or an extreme level of nickel-and-diming, every instance on this list is nothing less than unacceptable.

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8. The Culling - More Than One Match

Battle royale actioner The Culling is a perfect example of whatever the opposite of a noble underdog story is. It launched as The Culling 2 on the same day as Fortnite: Battle Royale in 2018, which sucks, but you’ll stop feeling bad for The Culling developer and publisher Xaviant right about now.

After a single week on storefronts the game was pulled due to player criticism over the game being wildly unfinished, it was then rebooted as The Culling: Origins which restored the game to its more complete state from back in 2016. Then in early 2019 the studio said the game hadn’t made enough money so they were shutting down the servers only to announce a year later in 2020 that the game was back from the dead yet again with an absolutely wild pay-per-match model.

Yes, a battle royale game that wanted you to pay for every match you played. Insanity.

You were given a token for one free match per day but after that you’d need to pay up. Obviously, as a Telltale game would put it, everybody disliked that, so they then changed their tune to give you ten free games per day before you had to start paying. It’s genuinely hard to think of a more consumer unfriendly move they could have chosen. It will likely come as no large shock that just six months later the servers were shut again, this time for good.