8 Video Games You Didn't Realise Broke The Industry

The games that kickstarted those trends all players love to hate.

by Ewan Paterson
LA Noire Season Pass
Rockstar

We're currently on the cusp of a new console generation, and as players start to look back at the gaming industry's last decade, there are bound to be mixed feelings. We've been gifted with some truly phenomenal experiences like The Last of Us and Red Dead Redemption 2, but at the same time, players have also seen the emergence of some really damaging trends.

Micro-transactions, season passes and as-a-service models are but a few of the worst offenders, while lootboxes, annualised releases and more were all also popularised over the last decade.

Some of these trends are finally on their way out, but as the new Xbox and PlayStation beckon, it stands to reason that most will look back on the last two console cycles with mixed feelings.

And it's with that in mind that it's worth considering how these trends actually began. They all had to come from somewhere, and in some cases, the actual source of the outbreak, as it were, is genuinely quite unexpected. No genre is spared; single-player, multiplayer... all have had a hand in fashioning the trends most players today simply cannot stand.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and the Golden Age of Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled.