8 Ways Greed Is Wrecking Modern Gaming

The Gordon Gekko maxim - that greed, for lack of a better word, is good - is one that, thankfully, not many good people approve of.

Those with common-sense (clearly not those who work on Wall Street) might even go so far as to label it an immoral principle - one that, having already poisoned the film, media, and sport industries and the like, is fast on its way to corrupting our games.

There was once a time - a golden age - when the creators of games would focus any talent they had to the noble cause of *gasp* making progressive, well-designed, and artistically valuable video games.

Then out of the blue came an epiphany from within the boardrooms of the big corporations; game studios can operate more profitably, they discovered, by inventing innovative and underhanded new methods of rinsing our wallets than they can by actually making video games.

As world capitalism enslaves us all to an endless pursuit of money, so too the big game studios are subordinating, more and more, their self-professed-yet-somewhat-dubious love for the industry beneath an almost insatiable hunger for profit.

The impact on our beloved gaming industry of this greed-ridden onslaught is manifold. Here are just 8 of its effects.

Imagine, for a second, that you've just bought a toaster. You arrive home, plug the toaster in, slide in a piece of bread and, immediately, a little card springs out: 'Your bread will toast in 23hrs 59mins,' it says, 'insert £1 to accelerate this process'.

Although a moral outrage would ensue if toasted micro-transactions existed in reality, modern games, especially those for iPhone and Android, are increasingly beginning to emulate this wicked payment method with relatively minimal backlash. Any innocent player of EA's Dungeon Keeper, for example, can expect to wait 24 hours to expand a single, small segment of the playing space or, for a modest fee (max. £69.99), skip the wait entirely. There has even been a recent, shocking revelation that EA (America's Worst Company, 2012 & 2013) make twice as much money on 'extra content' than they do on the sales of actual video games.

Even more depressingly, unlockables within games are no longer merit-based so much as wallet-based. There was a time - some might even remember it - when the sheer prestige of receiving a gold-camo'd rifle in CoD, a legendary weapon in the Elder Scrolls, or a flaming-recon helmet in Halo 3 would send squealing preteens running for their brothers.

These days, unlockables are not quite so exciting; the sight of the Batmobile on Rocket League means nothing more than that another £1.50 will be spent on tequila at the Psyonix Christmas party.