[makecheck]

The problem for me is that games are rarely designed to be “complete” anymore. I assume there’s some kind of catch with most of them, and it’s tiring. Why spend time on a game only to discover that it’s actually missing entire chapters, or has major bugs, or is curiously un-fun without an oddly expensive “optional” item? (Clearly many people must fall for these schemes, otherwise so many games would not be designed this way.)

“Initial price” seems to be the lure. Game revenue would look a lot different if publishers were required to use the term “Submit DOWN PAYMENT of $0.99 (All Content: $200.00)” or “Pay First Month $0.99 (Price Per Month: $3.99)” or “Try Now (All Content: $389.00)” or “Buy Chapters 1-3 ($9.99)”.

Similarly, it would be very useful if publishers were required to show statistics on what percentage of people bought each downloadable pack. If you offer different downloadable chapters for instance and I see you have 50,000 downloads of the first chapter at $0.99 and like 10 people buying Chapter 2, I can conclude that maybe your game was not fun enough for people to want to play more. The platform may be able to determine this too, e.g. calculating an “average price per hour” factor that translates app time from those who purchased at least one component of the app, giving you a sense of how much time they were able to spend for their money.

[the-pigeon]

There's a ton of modern games that don't do this.

Most of the top games your find on metacritic for Switch, PS4, PC and Xbox One don't do that.

For example games like Breath of the Wild, Witcher 3, and Read Dead Redemption 2 are complete games without the catch you are talking about.

[p1necone]

Basically just stay away from EA, Activision and Ubisoft and you won't find that much of this stuff.

Did I miss any?

[ok_coo]

I think you tagged the main offenders. I've been gaming since the 80s and if you look at the top games that have come out this generation on Metacritic, games and the gaming industry are hitting it out of the park. There are actually too many good games to play, you'd have a hard time playing through them all even if you were unemployed.

One just needs to stay away from some of the larger publishers who have done questionable things. Plenty of other good companies/devs doing their thing, who deserve people's money.

[jhasse]

I've played Far Cry 5 from Ubisoft and Destiny 2 from Activision and they both seemed like complete games to me.

[p1necone]

Yep, even these big offenders only do it sometimes. EA released Apex Legends recently too - the key to that seems to be that Respawn owns the IP and EA didn't actually have any input in the development (allegedly).