7 Ways Modern Games Have Turned Into Scams

Every second tap on the screen brings up a purchase confirmation for items, usually for a hundred dollars. But installing the game on your iPad required your password, which by default remains active for a while, and by the age of five, every player is trained to click "YEAH SURE WHATEVER" on any alerts that pop up at the start of a new game. This isn't a game; this is a Trojan Horse using the existence of children as a weakness in your credit card.

Sky View/Photodisc/Getty Images
The existence of children can also result from a weakness in Trojans.

It wasn't even an attempt to exploit a parent's love. It weaponized a parent's wish for a child to be quiet for just a moment, and hoped that they'd be too busy to check their credit card statements. This app was designed specifically to harvest money from overloaded, newly-bankrupted parents, and leave them screaming at their own children. It's the most evil software outside of the guidance program which steers nuclear warheads through hollowed out volcano craters. On the upside, it's possibly the most educational software ever written.

In Dungeon Hunter 4, your options are "FIGHT," "ITEM," and "CREDIT CARD," because you have to buy healing potions. Note that we didn't say "better" healing potions. You start with three each day, and cash money is the only way to get more. Never mind enchanted armor and game-breaking weapons, we're now expected to pay for the most basic of power-ups. Expecting people to pay for medical care? Gameloft's importing the absolute worst things about the real world into fantasy.

As gamers, working out the scores that result from pushing buttons is our only skill, and they still thought they could screw us over. Especially since the only authentic review of the new Dungeon Keeper would be grabbing it by the throat and screaming "HOW DARE YOU TAKE THAT GREAT GAME'S NAME?", and then it taking 24 hours for that action to complete unless you want to pay real money.

Classics like Theme Park and Dungeon Keeper have been rewritten as annoyance-a-thons. Two decades of improving technology have made the games actively worse than they were when first released. In the old days, they only slowed down if you tried to run two programs -- now they do it because they've been programmed to. In an awful irony, putting less than a megabyte of data on a bulky plastic cartridge was a less stupidly expensive waste of technology.

Big developers aren't just devolving into Supercell-grade garbage; they're desecrating their own icons in an attempt to extract a bit more money. But if you try to sell an emulation of the old games, they'll still sue you to oblivion. Luckily, no one is charging money for free and easily-found emulations of all those classic games. Because it sure would be terrible if everyone downloaded emulators and played those instead until the current business model collapsed.

"Zero Day Downloadable Content" is how game developers add their own tax to their retail price. The game carves itself into pieces, which you have to buy and feed back to it to get it up to size. It's an awful autocannibalistic menu advertised as an extra feature. And every time the game offers "Hail, great hero of Ass'kickeroth, wouldst thou like to buy the next level for seven American dollars?", it ruins the immersion like a grenade in a sensory deprivation tank. But while games used to extract non-essential parts, some are now hacking off their own heads and trying to sell them to you. But looking stupider and clumsier in the process.

Capcom
Then again, "looking stupid" seems to be this guy's entire deal.

Asura's Wrath was a game about gods punching each other, and it cut off its own ending until customers agreed to its demands. That's only justified if you've been telling free stories for one thousand nights already. I'm not saying that the story they sold is such bullshit that you'd be insulted even if they gave it to you for free, but it features a main character being tough and having amnesia. And it's a beat 'em up, a genre in which most plots read like one of the concussed losers vented their frustrations by punching a keyboard.

It ends with a blatant continue point which fans thought promised a sequel, but which was really an ad for downloadable content. SPOILER: The main character fights the final big boss and wins by punching him in the face.

Capcom
"I'm as stunned as you are. And as this Primordial God who predates the universe apparently was."

Even worse was Demon's Score, which pretended to be a full game. The only paid extras were some costumes, which is normally a great way to extract cash from obsessives without damaging the rest of the game. I love players with paid outfits. They're funding the developers while gift-wrapping their own asses for me to kick. But Demon's Score is a music/rhythm game, and each costume unlocks a new musical theme. The base game ships with only one. So if you want to beat the game without buying the extras, you have to play the same musical level over and over again. The game turns itself into audio water torture, with the insulting assumption that you have nothing better to do than keep putting up with this bullshit.

They're not just breaking their games to sell you the pieces; you're only renting that wreckage. Gaming extras are worse purchases than magic beans, and only slightly less imaginary. EA casually informed players of SimCity Social, The Sims Social, and Pet Society that they'd be shutting those worlds down. "What's that, players? You'd spent thousand of real dollars? We can't hear you. Our ears are blocked by thousands of real dollars." No apology, no offline mode, not even a receipt reading "ONE SCREWING PAID IN FULL." The closest they came to acknowledging it was recommending that players move on to their PopCap games. That's what EA thinks of the players: "We have finished screwing you with this product. Proceed in an orderly manner so that we can screw you on the next product."

These always-online games create artificial economies, but depend on real servers, which need to make money. So the instant people stop buying things, everything they already bought disappears. That's a fable economists tell their children to scare them at night. Or maybe so that they don't feel bad about ripping suckers off.

They tried the same thing with Rock Band.

EA
I didn't even buy the game, and this message makes me want to punch them.

That wasn't telling players that they couldn't play online any more, or that they couldn't buy new songs any more. That was telling them, "This thing you thought you bought on the device you think you own? Nope and nope." But there's a slight social difference between Rock Band and people who pretend to have pets on Facebook, because the backlash forced EA to leave it online. They didn't even have the guts to apologize, claiming that the message officially delivered to every player in a way which absolutely fits with their past behavior was a mysterious accident.