Games That Rip Gamers Off Big Time

It's not exactly news to anybody, but gamers like to play games. Oftentimes, game developers like to play games too — so much that they spend their careers wrestling with the nuances of design. But the studios themselves? They're not here for the games: they're here for the money. Many industry executives may not even touch video games. And, hey: fair enough. It's a job, there's money to be made, and somebody's got to figure out how to pay for development, right?

In the best-case scenario, a great game is matched with a great business model. Gamers feel they've received what they paid for, and everybody walks away happy. But on the flip side of that coin, sometimes a title will release that picks the player's pockets, and runs away to the bank. These aren't just cases where the game wasn't very good: these are intentional steps taken by the games industry to milk the consumer for every last penny, in exchange for...not much. Very often, this makes the game itself worse, even ruining what might otherwise have been a great experience.

Here's when the industry ripped off the people they're supposed to serve: the gamers.

Anyone who's even glanced at the development history of 2015's Metal Gear Solid V knows that things did not go well. Creative differences between series mastermind Hideo Kojima (who is actually creative) and Konami executives (who are not) resulted in the latter firing the former, and significant cuts to the scope of the final game — which is, effectively, unfinished.

Part of that was because Metal Gear Solid V was an expensive endeavor by any metric. Konami was watching money fly out the door, while Kojima continued to delay the game's release again and again. So, desperate to claw some money back for their investment, Konami made a stunning decision: to release the opening chapter of the game as a standalone release in 2014 — about a year and a half before the full game would debut.

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes is, on its own merits, a fantastic experience, with all of the drama, tension, and player freedom that the franchise is known for. The only problem? The entire thing is only about two hours long. And yet, Konami priced it at an astonishing forty bucks! As great as Ground Zeroes was, that price was highway robbery.

In fairness to the corporate executives, the gaming fanbase can be an ungrateful lot. They'll claim that games should be cheaper, yet demand better graphics and bigger worlds, and also want them released immediately. Plus, there are pirates in the internet seas. Let's face it, gamers: sometimes we're greedy, too. In many cases, we ask for just too much.

Like for our games to actually work.

Imagine Warner Bros.' horror when they found out that paying customers wanted a functioning product. When Batman: Arkham Knight, which had been a huge hit on consoles, released on PC, it was a broken mess. Buggy and riddled with framerate drops, it was like some insane clown's take on what a Batman game should be. Even after Warner Bros. attempts to fix it, the game still just didn't work.

For whatever reason, Warner Bros. Interactive simply chose to pull the game from stores rather than patch it again. That, in itself, made the entire affair a huge waste of players' time and expectations. WBI did offer refunds, but they were not given automatically (each customer had to apply for one), and they were only for Steam purchases: anybody who bought, say, a physical copy from a store was out of luck.

Does anybody else hear insane clown laughter?

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege from Ubisoft has been one of the quiet success stories of the last couple of years. After a relatively soft launch, the title has grown into one of the most-beloved team shooters in the world. Taut, tight, and tactical, Siege offers a more strategic and deliberately-paced alternative to the market's traditionally twitchy affairs. Players pick from a roster of characters called operatives, and, like a lot of such games, they're not all available at once. Only by playing and winning matches can players earn enough Renown to unlock new operatives. To get the entire roster, dozens of hours of time, and gallons of sweat, were required.

Until March of 2018, that is. That's when Ubisoft decided to bring the basic version of the game up to date by unlocking all of the original 20 operators, for free, to everyone. Great! Free stuff! Well, great if you haven't already spent all of that time and effort getting them. 

Effectively, Ubisoft was now giving away what a lot of players had striven for. Ubisoft didn't offer any kind of compensation or in-game reward for those who had unlocked these characters the old-fashioned way. All players are equal, but some are more equal than others — Ubisoft, however, treated them all equally anyway. For the true die-hards who'd spent their free time getting those operators, "equal" just wasn't fair.

Game developer Peter Molyneux has made lots of high-profile games over the years, from Populous to Fable. He tends to think big, and talk even bigger. As you'd imagine, that lands him into trouble sometimes. So when he left Microsoft's Lionhead Studios to go indie, did he learn his lesson, curtail his expectations, and announce plausible goals?

No! What kind of fun would that be?

Instead, Molyneux released Curiosity — What's Inside the Cube?, a mobile game that was...a cube. Really. Like an ultra-minimalist take on Minecraft, Curiosity featured a giant cube made up of smaller cubelets. If a player tapped a cubelet, it disappeared. The goal? Get to the center. Simple.

What made it more interesting was that Curiosity was massively multiplayer, so everyone picked away at the same cube. It was essentially a race to get to the center first. Fair enough. But then the promises came in: the center of the cube was a prize, and more precisely, a life-changing prize. Whoever reached it first wouldn't be the same person afterwards. Amazing! Incredible!

Fake. 

The eventual winner, Bryan Henderson, has yet to see his life transform. The "life-changing" prize turned out to be a promise to be made a god character in Molyneux's next game, Godus, who would get to influence timed multiplayer events and even get a cut of the revenue. Henderson has done precisely none of that, which means the entire point of Curiosity was a sham.

DLC has been with us since the mid-2000s: while it takes different forms, it's always some kind of additional content for a base game that costs an additional charge. In the best cases, this can take the form of a major expansion adding lots of new story. In the worst cases, it's horse armor. But, usually, it's a map pack.

One thing that's remained the same, however, is the acronym: DLC stands for downloadable content. Well, this was one area where developer Capcom decided to innovate. Who needs downloadable content when you could have disc-loaded content? Okay, they never actually used that term. But that was basically what they did with Street Fighter X Tekken, when they revealed that the first DLC drop for the game was already on the disc.

Needless to say, people were not happy. They'd just paid full price for the disc, only to find that, really, they were only paying for part of the disc. To get the whole disc, they'd have to shell out even more money. The backlash was fierce, and this disc-LC system is not used by anybody these days.

One of the major trends of the last few years has been the idea of games releasing way before they're actually, y'know, done. "Early access" allows developers to earn money during development, while also letting players have some input into said development. Additionally, this can be a way to build buzz in the community without having to spend money on marketing. In the best case scenario, a small game from a small team can explode from nothing to biggest game in the world using nothing but an early access program.

But there be dragons in early access: namely, it might stay early, forever. Many such games simply cease development at some point, often with no warning or explanation (let alone refunds). While there have been a lot of these cases over the years, none is so big or so prominent as DayZ. The game is a persistent online survival experience set against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse. Players must work together, or against each other, to scrounge for supplies and make it through the day without starving or becoming zombie-food.

The game became extremely popular, but it forgot to do one thing: finish development. Years after it first hit early access, fans are still receiving promises that it's coming out. Really! Maybe. As it stands, a whole lot of players have paid good money for what amounted to an eternal beta. Almost like the developers became zombies themselves, who, to our knowledge, do not know how to code.

Sick of hearing about how microtransactions rip off gamers? Don't worry, there's more! In this case, however, it's more a case of fine-tuning, or lack thereof. In 2K's NBA 2K18, players can upgrade their character's stats and customize his appearance, just as in other RPG-sports games. All of this requires in-game currency, which can be earned simply by playing the game. For those with less patience, that in-game currency can be purchased with real-world money.

So far, so standard. Many other games have similar systems and are more or less fair in how they go about it. What 2K got wrong was in the balance of it all: how much in-game currency cost in real-world terms vs how much that in-game currency was worth in the game itself. Basically, to do anything in the game, players would have to spend money, and a good deal of it. Effectively, NBA 2K18 isn't a $60: that's just a teaser price for future purchases down the road.

But this is different than simple corporate greed, because...uh...we'll have to get back to you on that one.