Introduction
Game publishers often work very hard to find ways to innovate in greed. I love some video games, but I don't love some video game companies. Hi folks, it's Zaid Ikram, and today on Game Ranks, we're discussing 10 of the greediest game company moves ever part two. Now, I'm just going to put out a little quick disclaimer: this doesn't necessarily mean developers. A lot of the time, developers are hanged into doing crap they don't want to do because it's Tim the Publishers say. That's not to say there are no greedy developers; they exist, of course. But I want people to know that I'm just not automatically saying that a lot of the time the creative teams behind these games just want to make games. Without any further ado, let's dive into the list.
Number 10
Starting at number 10: "Escape from Tarkov" charging $250 for the long-requested PvE mode. We're going to start this one off hot today, folks, because this one just sounds horrible, and it's worse. So, at the end of April, the Escape from Tarkov developers, Battlestate Games, announced they were going to finally add a proper co-op mode to the game. Yay, right? Well, it's not free, though. If you want to access the new mode, then you have to buy the absurdly overpriced "The Unheard Edition," which is seriously, I am not making this up, $250. I would like to call this the "unheard of" edition. But yeah, what's included in it? There's got to be stuff other than just this mode, right? Sure, you get a variety of pay-to-win crap like expanded pockets, additional equipment, and resource space for your stash. And also, free access to all subsequent DLCs. Free access for $250? The last one stands out because Tarkov previously sold the $150 "Edge of Darkness" edition, which also promised free access to all future DLC. That edition of the game mysteriously vanished from Tarkov's storefront, and guess what? Edge of Darkness owners aren't getting the PvE mode. So just to be clear, I gave that warning that says it's not always devs; there's often a company above them. That's not the case here. The Tarkov devs aren't just selling some extremely overpriced version of their game; they're also taking back the promise of free DLC for people who bought the slightly less overpriced edition of their game in the past. Somehow, it gets worse. There was, of course, a ton of fan outrage over the whole thing, so Battlestate tried to make things right in about the worst way possible. In an attempt to calm "Edge of Darkness" edition owners, Battlestate offered some rewards to those players, which included a bunch of pay-to-win parts of the bundle, as well as access to offline PvE for "Edge of Darkness" owners for six months. Wow, how generous. And along with that, they dropped this other bombshell: high-priority matchmaking for "Edge of Darkness" owners for six months. Wait, what? That wasn't one of the selling points of the "unheard of" edition. Are they also selling priority matchmaking? Like, are all the free second-class citizens now going to have to wait in line while people who pay get to the front of the line? It's all a mess, and it's utterly cratered Battlestate Games' reputation among its player base. Sucks, because Tarkov is a cool game. Eh, what are you going to do?
Number 9
And number nine: "Metal Gear Survive" made you pay for additional character slots. Konami's reputation was pretty much in the toilet by the time "Survive" came out. The Kojima-less Metal Gear Solid spin-off has its defenders, but there's no defending the almost free-to-play level of nickel-and-diming this game tries to pull on you. We did talk about this in our previous "Greediest Video Game Moves Ever" game, but we neglected to mention this whole debacle making you pay for extra character slots. Like, there are microtransactions everywhere, and most of them are unnecessary, or at least for things that players have grown accustomed to paying for. It's not good, obviously, but the most outlandish microtransaction is that they want you to pay for more character slots in a mostly single-player game. They somehow expect people to happily go along with paying a $10 fee to unlock slots three and four for characters. Even most free-to-play games give you at least one or two more character slots before asking for extra cash. But not "Survive," which is not a free-to-play game; it's a game that you had to buy. And one thing I do want to emphasize is that a lot of headlines and articles got the nature of this stuff wrong. It wasn't save slots that Konami was selling; it was extra characters. You know, like when you're selecting to start a new game in something like "Super Metroid"? This would be like you'd have to pay to fill out those other slots. I don't know who's willing to play through this game a second time and need that extra slot, but the fact that they're trying to charge real money for it is ridiculous, especially on top of a game like I said that already costs 40 bucks.
Number 8
And number eight: Ubisoft locking a Jabba mission behind a $100-plus special edition pre-order bonus is just getting out of control, and people are starting to get sick of it. "Star Wars Outlaws" is hardly the first game to have an overly complicated, overpriced pre-order catalog, but this one may be one of the most expensive we've seen yet, and it's such a high-profile game. There's your standard $70 version, which, yeah, I guess we're used to at this point; got to love that inflation. But then there's the $110 Gold Edition that comes with a season pass and an exclusive mission called Jabba's Gambit, leading people to believe that if you wanted to see the Hut himself, you're forced to pay up. It's not quite accurate. You work for Jabba in the game no matter what; this pre-order bonus is an extra mission. But still, that's $110 at launch. If you want to pay even more, there's the Ultimate Edition, which comes with a bunch of extra skins and crap and costs an eye-watering $130. I don't know if they're just trying to be deceptive or if they just changed the bundles after the initial backlash, but the Ultimate Edition says it does come with three days of Early Access, while the infographic says for the Gold Edition, there's Early Access listed everywhere. But if you look at the product description, it says Early Access with the Gold Edition. So, at the very least, they have created a labyrinth of nonsense here, and it all sucks. This pre-order crap is just worthless, but it's "Star Wars," so they know people are just going to pay up.
Number 7
And number seven: EA charging $360 for a One-Winged Angel death box. "Apex Legends" has had microtransaction problems for a while now, but they're not getting any better. They're getting worse. Just recently, there's a crossover event with "Final Fantasy 7" where they pulled their usual antics but bumped up the price. Normally, they do this thing where you have to unlock so many cosmetics, usually around 24, and you get access to this Mythic Rarity item that they've got dangling in front of your face. This thing can be obtained randomly, but it might as well not be in the rotation, because the chances of getting it are very close to zero, and even then, that's not always the case. Sometimes, these mythic items are just gone for good. Normally, if you want to unlock these event heirlooms, it costs around $160, give or take how many crafting materials you have. As somebody who hasn't seriously played Apex in a while, those numbers are pretty ridiculous. It's all digital crap that's effectively worthless, yet they're still somehow getting away with charging more than 100 bucks for this junk. With the "Final Fantasy 7" crossover, again, it's worse. Now, if you want to unlock the rarest item, which is the One-Winged Angel death box, you've got to get 36 total cosmetics, which is going to cost around $360. It's a box with a wing on it. Yeah. For people who play Apex regularly, the cost is more like $290, but that's $290 for a box with a wing on it. It somehow even gets worse from here, because fans have datamined the game and found a $700 potential heirloom in the game files, so they're just testing the waters with these absurd "Final Fantasy 7" item prices. There are no upper limits on microtransaction prices anymore. They just like that we assume somebody out there is dumb enough to pay for them, and somebody is. Obviously. Of course, somebody is. That's how things work.
Number 6
And number six: Razer sold $100 face masks that don't do anything. It's corporate greed at its most idiotic. Back in 2021, at the height of the pandemic, Razer revealed these, frankly, ridiculous-looking Zephyr face masks, which they claimed used N95-grade filters. They charged 100 bucks for them. They were planning a more expensive $150 version called The Zephyr Pro, but they didn't do anything. They were not N95 masks. They never submitted them for testing. They're incapable of doing the one thing you'd buy them to do. Razer continued to sell them as actual face masks, only they stopped advertising as N95 when they were called out on it. All the time, they tried to claim these masks were not medical devices or respirators, etc., but the advertising was already out there. We know they were lying. And just recently, the FTC fined them over it. Razer made about a million dollars selling these things, but the FTC forced them to pay around $1.1 million for misrepresentation. In comparison to a lot of these bigger companies, a million bucks is kind of a drop in the bucket, but the whole product was so blatantly worthless and greedy, that it does earn a spot on this list.
Number 5
And number five: the Diablo II Real Money Auction House. Diablo III launched with an in-game auction house. There were two different versions of it: one in which you could use in-game currency to buy things, and another in which saw items trade hands using real-world cash. The Real Money Auction House (RMAH) was one of Blizzard's biggest post-noticed backfires, and while they made plenty more mistakes in the past few years, the first greedy move was perhaps their worst. The thing about the auction house is that many people look back at it fondly for some reason because some people managed to make a lot of money relatively easily. A lot of players were willing to pay frankly ludicrous prices to get the gear they wanted. I'm talking hundreds of dollars for a single piece of gear. Of course, Blizzard got their cut of every sale, and at least for a little while, it made them a lot of money at the expense of the game. But because any loot could be bought and sold, they made items rarer, which turned the game into a barren wasteland full of dull gray loot that didn't mean anything. Players weren't getting loot, just buying the best equipment on the auction house was the main way to do it. And well, that broke balance in the game pretty quickly because it made the rarest and best items too easy to get. The auction house made Diablo II a worse game that catered to the worst impulses of its player base, all because Blizzard wanted their cut from the Diablo II black market. At least they eventually reversed course and removed the auction house from the game completely. It's a rare outcome for this kind of move. Usually, the greed only gets worse. But it was a hell of a backlash.
Number 4
And number four: Nexon lies to players about item rarities. If you want to hear stories of greed, look no further than Nexon and MapleStory. If you don't know, MapleStory is the first game to include loot box mechanics, and they were called gachapon tickets back then. These guys are the innovators, the undisputed masters of game industry greed. For over a decade, players were suspected of the game of lying about the drop rates of certain items, but it was never 100% proven, at least until early 2024, when Nexon was fined an unprecedented $8.99 million by the Korea Fair Trade Commission for this exact practice. The game advertised chances that were never possible for certain gacha boxes while making certain cubes, which allowed players to upgrade their equipment, nearly impossible to get. Back in 2011, they released a statement straight-up denying they were changing probabilities. So yeah, Nexon was 100% without a shadow of a doubt lying. They were lying about drop rates on their loot boxes, and they were lying to players' faces. When players accused them of this stuff, it's some of the most shameless greed I've ever seen, just straight-up stealing from their customers. And in the end, it was probably worth it. They got fined, yes, $8.99 million in total, but they made far more in profit. Those fines are just the cost of doing business when intentionally deceiving your customers is part of what you do.
Number 3
And number three: Star Citizen's $48,000 JPEG. Unless through some miracle Star Citizen manages to come out at some point, it's hard not to look at the hard numbers and conclude this game's one of the biggest scams of all time in the gaming industry. $644 million raised from crowdfunding, pre-orders, and ships. The game was meant to come out in 2014. That's 10 years ago, and it's still nowhere even close to done. They claim that the spin-off Squadron 42 is done, and then they post updates about how they're making random changes to it. Features keep getting smaller, and the scope of the game keeps looking more and more unrealistic, with the big-money donors starting to get cold feet. The game may finally get pushed out the door in the next year or two and called finished, regardless of how complete it is. You could play the game now in pre-alpha form, but the vast majority of these ships continue to just be a twinkle in the developer's eyes, and more realistically, a JPEG on a computer screen. The most expensive of these JPEGs is the Legatus ship pack, which, and I'm serious here, is $48,000. It gets you every ship in the game, sure, the majority of them do not exist, though, and there's about a 99% chance that they never will. They try to keep these absurdly overpriced bundles away from the hoi polloi by making the offers only available for people who have already spent $1,000 in stores. So it's whales only, folks. But it's $48,000. That sounds like a sick joke, but some people requested this. It's too late for them; they've drunk the Kool-Aid; they're asking for seconds. But seriously, don't waste your money on this thing. That is a down payment on a house. If you have $48,000, get a house. You're better off just putting it into a paper shredder than investing it in anything involving Star Citizen.
Number 2
And number two: Nintendo's price-fixing campaign. Nintendo is a company that's well known for its fiscal responsibility. They pay their employees well; they're relentlessly frugal with their spending. Their CEOs aren't even absurdly overpaid. On paper, it sounds like the ideal company. That doesn't mean they are not without their dark side. There have been multiple occasions where Nintendo's been accused of engaging in price fixing. Famously, in 1991, and again in 2002 in Europe. So they probably didn't learn their lesson the first time around, maybe not so much even the second time around. What do I mean by price fixing? It means Nintendo used its dominant position in the games industry to dictate terms to retailers. Back in 1991, multiple retailers said that Nintendo outright forced them to sell the NES at retail price, and if they attempted to lower that price at all, they would just cut the store off completely. One retailer was threatened for just trying to cut the price by 6 cents, 6 pennies, nearly no money whatsoever. Even back then, Nintendo was using its dominant position in the industry to push around retailers, and they were sued for it. Back in 1991, Nintendo was forced to pay $25 million back to consumers who were affected by the price fixing in the form of a $5 rebate that people could use to buy $20 to $50 games, which is not a particularly punitive action. The 2002 European ruling was a lot more hefty. This time, Nintendo got fined $147 million for artificially inflating console prices in certain European regions. Even though prices differed drastically between certain companies, Nintendo and its partners would punish anyone who engaged in parallel trade to get cheaper prices. Both times, Nintendo fully well knew what they were doing. They knew they were bending, possibly breaking, financial law to better serve their bottom line, and they acted anyway. Nintendo was and still is an extremely wealthy company. They don't need to be engaging in sketchy, underhanded tactics, but just couldn't help themselves.
Number 1
And finally, at number one: Peter Molyneux and 22Cans sold in-game land for $900,000. Does anybody remember this nonsense back in 2021 during the height of NFT fever? Mr. Molyneux, gaming's most infamous hype man, announced this new game called "Legacy." It was and I guess still is going to be one of those dystopian nightmare games that allows people with more money than sense to buy up virtual land so they could be virtual landlords. There wasn't even a game yet, but you better believe Molyneux and 22Cans were still going to sell that bridge. The NFT gold rush was still in full swing at that time, and somebody incredibly managed to sell $52 million worth of virtual land. One of those plots cost $900,000, and apparently, somebody bought it. This was all years ago. What's become of Legacy? Have all those lucky landowners gotten rich yet? Well, it was launched back in October 2023 to basically zero fanfare, and it doesn't seem anyone is playing it. It does exist, but it's an unplayable, crappy game. I don't know how anyone would spend nearly a million bucks on anything involving this because, from all accounts, it's as dead as a doornail with a rapidly dwindling player base made up mostly of desperate bag holders. I'd feel bad for the fools who gave this guy money, but after the abysmal Goddess and, you know, basically everything this man has ever said being at best massive exaggerations and most outrageous lies, anybody who lost money on this probably should have known better.
Outro
And that's it for this list, folks. I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know what you think in the comments. Be sure to drop a like if you did.Thank you all for reading, and I will see you in the next blog.
0 Comments