Biggest Rip-Offs In Gaming - Microtransactions, Psychological Tricks, Skinner Boxes, Dark Patterns And Greed

[Lady Adjani]

Total War : Warhammer 3 requires you to buy TWW 1&2 and a fuckload of DLC if you want the complete package

 

[Rattus]

This DLC for Gal*Gun: Double Peace that costs the price of a AAA game these days that lets you see high schooler's underwear.
View attachment 7872577

I looked into this a bit more, and it actually gets worse. To get that functionality for free, modding is an option but not even necessary; there is an in-game item that does basically the same thing (increases clothing transparency to 90%—the DLC offers 100%).

It was ostensibly intended as a joke by the devs, but clearly some people have actually bought it—as you can see from that screenshot, there are currently 16 reviews for it on Steam. That's obviously not counting anyone who bought it for PS Vita/PS4 instead, or simply didn't review it.

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

More seriously, many old sports games on last-gen consoles would release the same game every year only with updated rosters. I'm not exaggerating, they usually wouldn't even update the menu, interface, or many of the in-game dates.

Ultimate team rakes in billions for EA. Would love to buy the new college football game. But EA half asses their games to cater to people who buy Ultimate Team packs.

 

[Hweeks]

Releasing games as "finished" when they are not done. Example - Tainted Grail came out with the 3rd act completely bare bones. If i knew that I would not have bought it, that's what I get for buying a new game. Never again..

 

[The Last Stand]

This DLC for Gal*Gun: Double Peace that costs the price of a AAA game these days that lets you see high schooler's underwear.
View attachment 7872577

I hope somebody called the police.

Remember when EA (and other developers) used to do that Online Pass crap so that they could try to undermine the used game market?

 

[Google.com]

I dunno. some of them are really autistic and you could fly the real thing after a while. See PDMG or HEATBLUR stuff.
Pretty certain I could steal an A-10 if I didn't die of lead poisoning getting into the cockpit.

Some are worth it. But airline flight sims you have to pay $75 to get a working not shit weather system only for the devs to release a new version 2.0 which costs another $75 dollars to update. Then MFSF 2020 opened the flood gates of shit by introducing flight simulators to people who don't like simulator games and half of them are now just pretty models using the same flight model as the vanilla 747 because peak laziness.

Captain sim for example went from the best flight simulator addon creator in prepar3d to now making utter dogshit. He released a 30 dollar c130 for mfsf with no cockpit. He then made a 777 with a 747 flight model and stole some avionics from the same 747

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Let's talk about Gacha.
First of all there is the concept of pity/spark. In old gacha you could theoretically try hundreds of times to get a character and be unlucky enough to never get it. Modern gacha has a "pity" which translates to a rate up at some point (soft) until the game just gives you the character if you are that unlucky (hard), usually at around 200 tries. Sparking is another method where you get a point each attempt and at 200 points you can just outright buy a character, though it does have the benefit of not resetting on getting the character, so you could be unlucky enough to get a lot of points but still pull a character and then waste the reminder to get another/dupe.

So you get the character and that's it, right? Nope, a lot of characters have very important part of their gear locked behind the need to get at least one dupe. So you need to pull multiple. Some games give you an alternative method to get dupes (but not characters).

Okay then it's done, right? No now there's the weapons banner. Most free to play weapons are garbage that will not synergize with the characters. Games like Genshin has the weapons have their own banner with the weapons being custom made for a specific character, so giving that weapon to other characters will not be effective. And those weapons have dupes as well and a pity system.

Really the most interesting thing about most Gachas is how much leeway they give the player before fucking them.

 

[Breadbassket]

Really the most interesting thing about most Gachas is how much leeway they give the player before fucking them.

One could say that this is done is order to encourage someone to spend money by first letting them to get invested into the game time-wise.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

One could say that this is done is order to encourage someone to spend money by first letting them to get invested into the game time-wise.

Getting people is easy, not having players quit while keeping the whales satisfied is the real art.

 

[Flatline]

Biggest rip-offs in gaming? Paradox "DLCs" for its suite of grand strategy games, i.e., "Crusader Kings," "Europa Universalis," and "Hearts of Iron." For $14.99, you can add a new uniform to your troops. Or, for $39.99, you can buy an add-on for a mechanic that should've been included in the base game for free.

 

[Eschaton Aggravate]

Darktide at launch: terrible performance, bug ridden mess, barebones in terms of content/maps/weapon+ ingame skins, but they did have a working cash shop at launch with all the fancy skins, of course.

Mass effect 3 had that DLC where you can get the Protean companion, which was developed BEFORE the game launched and then cut from the game in order to sell it apart when the game came out, nowadays that's common practice for AAAA games.

For a more recent example, Monster Hunter Wilds released as a broken, buggy and still unoptimized mess, but worst of all, incomplete.
Apparently Capcom has some obligation towards its shareholders to make the fiscal year with a 10% profit increase or something, and they could reach that by selling the game prematurely, which they did, cutting out content to be drip fed through title updates, so they sold an incomplete product for the full price, with all the aforementioned ailments, with great success, and an army of shills and normies who defend these practises.

Another trick is how they implement free downloadable content, like emotes and whatnot, normally free content is simply added to the game, which they do with title updates, but these particular things can only be downloaded at their online store, so basically luring their customers with bait to the store in order to expose them to the microtransactions.

 

[Cod of War]

Train Sim World. Every game has thousands of dollars worth of DLC.

 

[Pale Empress]

I'd say the price isn't the worse cost, but the time. You're invested in your empire but the game lags so much in the end game it stops being fun.

Stopped playing Stellaris back in 2019 entirely because of this, and their gay DLC model. From what I understand it's a problem with the engine and is completely unfixable, eliciting a "Haha, whoopsy! We can't fix it but maybe we'll do a sequel that won't have this problem! Or maybe not! Who knows!" response.

Everybody constantly fawns over Paradox but all of my experiences with them leave me thinking theyre nothing but a pack of faggoty scammers. The VTMB2 kerfuffle does nothing but reinforce this opinion. I hope they all get AIDS. Absolute dogshit company.

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

View attachment 7872900

They made fun of us for saying this was an omen of terrible things to come back in 2006 and it ended up being ten thousand times worse than our most pessimistic imaginings.

 

[Calandrino]

I looked into this a bit more, and it actually gets worse. To get that functionality for free, modding is an option but not even necessary; there is an in-game item that does basically the same thing (increases clothing transparency to 90%—the DLC offers 100%).

It was ostensibly intended as a joke by the devs, but clearly some people have actually bought it—as you can see from that screenshot, there are currently 16 reviews for it on Steam. That's obviously not counting anyone who bought it for PS Vita/PS4 instead, or simply didn't review it.

New Zealand actually banned the game for being too casual:

The game was deemed objectionable and banned in New Zealand by the OFLC, due to its "sexualization of underage schoolgirls and low difficulty, making the game purely for titillation".[25][26]

Great precedent, we need stronger laws about babby games.

 

[moocow]

Flight simulator add-ons. No competition

Train Sim World would like a word.

Train Sim World. Every game has thousands of dollars worth of DLC.

Yup. And they release a new game almost every year now, with little-to-no changes from the previous version (rather like an annual sportsball game), and somehow despite promises to port over all the old content (that you've already paid for) to the new engine (free of charge to existing owners), it never seems to all make it over intact and there's always newer DLC you mysteriously have to buy again if you still want to use it.

Fucking assholes.

 

[Google.com]

Train Sim World would like a word.

Flight Simulator X Steam edition has over 10 grand of DLC on steam and has so much DLC steam won't show it all on the main store page. And all of the addons on steam are just the surface level shitty low quality ones. Off steam there is an infinite amount of shit to buy.

 

[Kofi Drinka]

Halo 3 ODST

The campaign wasn't the appeal of Halo for most people and the campaign was still 6 to 8 hours long.

 

[anti SJW]

I forgot the name, but the Metal Gear zombie game that charged you if you wanted more than one save slot.

 

[Mister Fister]

Total War : Warhammer 3 requires you to buy TWW 1&2 and a fuckload of DLC if you want the complete package

We need a Warhammer total war complete after Warhammer: Total War 3 is done.