As the years have gone by, game developers and publishers seem to have gotten more gutsy with the stupid decisions they tend to take, and while some of those stupid decisions ended up ultimately being a great thing (Half-Life 2 exclusive to Steam, anyone?), these days the companies seem to have taken an extreme anti-consumer stance. Here are some trends that have made their way into gaming, and we sincerely hope they all die off before the next crop of big-budget games hit stores.

Terrible DLC

It has become a terrible trend in the last couple of years to slice out a bit of a game that we’ve often played full price for and make us pay a little bit extra. An especially egregious example comes from a couple of years ago with the release of Mass Effect 3. BioWare thought that it would be a good idea to sell DLC with a rather important Prothean squad member separately. This also brings about the question of season passes, which promise a certain number of DLC to extend a game’s life. However, often times, the extra DLC is completely pointless (the combat arena DLC in BioShock Infinite, for example), and games like Call of Duty tend to turn into ghost towns by the time the latter half of the season pass is nearing completion.

Microtransactions in full priced games

What we thought would be a temporary trend that would backfire completely last year with games like Dead Space 3, Forza Motorsport 5 and Ryse: Son of Rome seems to have continued well into this year with the release of Assassin’s Creed Unity. We shouldn’t have to tell anyone why microtransactions are a bad thing, especially when you’ve already paid full price for the game. It also brings about the question of whether a studio can be trusted with not tampering a single-player game’s balance so as to promote microtransactions. Microtransactions in multiplayer games shouldn’t even have to be discussed, since they often bring about a major imbalance, where those with more money than others will undoubtedly get the upper hand.

Overpriced new-gen games

If you were to live in the US, the pricing between games on the newer consoles wouldn’t be different from the prices of the same games on the older consoles. Indian retailers and distributors, however, have taken it upon themselves to exponentially increase prices of new games on the PS4 and Xbox One. Games that used to cost between Rs 2,500 and Rs 3,000 on older consoles now have a much high price on the newer systems, ranging anywhere from Rs 3,500 to upwards of Rs 5,000. Especially egregious examples of this terrible pricing system include The Elder Scrolls Online, which costs Rs 4,799 (along with a monthly subscription fee) on the PS4, and The Evil Within, which sports a Rs 4,299 price tag on the PS4.

Abandoned Early Access games

A big reason that we tend to not pick up Early Access games (even going as far as discouraging others from doing so) is the horror stories we have heard about games getting abandoned halfway through development. Not only did we have the rather controversial Towns fiasco last year, where the developer basically quit development after taking all the money gamers paid for promise of a game, but more recently, we also got Double Fine ceasing all development on the rather anticipated Spacebase DF-9 – a game it had promised would get many more features but ultimately ended up getting scrapped, leaving gamers $30 poorer with an unfinished game on their hands.

Misleading marketing

Bigger companies have made it a trend to massively overhype their upcoming games, and as we got closer to release dates, some controversial decision or the other about the design of the game would anger consumers. Watch Dogs has been the biggest culprit in recent memory, with the 2012 E3 trailers showing us all sorts of pretty special effects, making us believe that (at the time unannounced) new-gen consoles would be as powerful as top of the line PCs. When the game finally came out, it was hit with a graphical downgrade so bad, the earlier-released Grand Theft Auto 5 ended up looking considerably better on the same platforms. On the PC side of things, Ubisoft decided to hide away the extra settings that would make the game look as good as it did in the E3 trailer, possibly to make it look only as good as the console versions for some reason.

Broken AAA games

The last few years (and this year in particular) have seen an alarming amount of so-called AAA games being borderline unplayable at launch, be it due to technical issues, game breaking bugs, or server problems that prevented gamers from enjoying multiplayer on day one. Battlefield 4 was plagued with an insane amount of issues across all platforms for the first three (or more) months, Halo: The Master Chief Collection is still largely unplayable online a month after its launch, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare had matchmaking issues for the first three weeks, and Ubisoft had to dish out free games to make up for the debacle that was Assassin’s Creed: Unity. It would be one thing if these were free-to-play games, but these are full-priced titles backed by well known publishers, so why the sloppiness?

Unoptimised PC ports

You rush home excited to play ‘insert game here’, but instead of actually playing the game, you’re stuck staring at your desktop after the game crashed out on you. And then, you have to use a bunch of third-party fixes to achieve acceptable frame rates, tweak in-game settings, and at times even use an ‘.exe’ shortcut to skip a bazillion game and hardware manufacturer logos. Granted PC games have always had issues, and the community has always been on the ball with providing fixes, but this year has been exceptionally bad for PC ports. I’m looking at you, Ubisoft.

Unskippable Cutscenes

Want to skip straight to the gameplay? Too bad.

When I purchase a game, sometimes I want to play it right away, especially if the story’s crap and the characters are relatively uninteresting. So why oh why can I not skip cut-scenes that go on forever? What’s even worse is when you have cut-scenes covering up loading times, so you absolutely have to sit through them every time you wish to replay missions or, God forbid, you die and have to retry a section. One of the worst offenders in recent times was Max Payne 3. The one thing I loved doing in that game was booting up random levels where I could shoot dudes in slow motion, but every single time I was forced to sit through Max’s monologues about depression, alcoholism and how his life was a big fat pile of poo.

Annual franchises

I have learnt to accept this trend, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it, especially when developers shamelessly churn out sequels year on year without bothering to tweak gameplay or visuals. I personally do not play FIFA – or any other sports franchise for that matter - so for me, the Call of Duty series would be the worst offender in this regard. Modern Warfare reinvented the series in 2007, and since then, there have been very few COD games that have actually bothered with a new setting. And even then, gameplay largely remains the same. If you plan on sticking to the same formula, at least give gamers some time to actually miss the franchise.

Unnecessarily heavy games

Sensible patch sizes? What even is that?

If you’ve picked up one of the new consoles, you’ll know what we’re talking about. When a game has a 20 GB day-one patch (Halo: Master Chief Collection), you know you’re doing something wrong. Granted, we’re talking about five games here, but when Far Cry 4 – an intricate open world game with more things to do than you can come up with – has a smaller download size than a day-one patch, you’ve goofed up. Games themselves have gotten quite large over the years, and while this isn’t a problem if you pick up a retail copy, slow Indian internet stops us from considering many games out there, like Titanfall and its massive 50 GB download, especially since EA has decided to go completely digital with its Indian PC releases.

Tell us about what depressing, terrible trends in video gaming you would want to go die in a fire in the comments below.