Hey, where are the microtransactions? Scene from »EA FC24«
Photo: EA Sports
Last year was a brilliant year for video games – judging by the criticism. But among the many good games there were also miserable failures, shameless scams and – by far the worst kind of video games – endless variations of gambling simulations with annoying pay-to-win mechanisms. Sports simulations in particular stand out: the microtransactions contained in games like “NBA 2K24” or “EA FC24”, a payment method for purchasing digital goods, even though it is a full-price game, are also viewed critically by the authorities.
Three years ago, the government agency responsible for age ratings no longer released the basketball simulation “NBA 2K22” without restrictions for the first time. This year, thousands of players on Steam, the largest distribution platform for video games on the Internet, punished the game with mostly negative reviews. The compulsion to buy packs of random cards that contain NBA superstars, jerseys, moves or hairstyles in order to compete with other players online is growing every year. At the same time, consumers complain that the game was released for the PC in an unfinished state. There are also said to be an above-average number of hackers on the game’s servers. The football simulation “EA FC24” also gets its fat off. “This is by far the worst EA game,” writes a disappointed customer on Steam.
The only games that get worse ratings on the platform are those that are fundamentally unsuccessful in their construction. At the forefront is “Skull Island: Rise of Kong” from Game Mill Entertainment. Graphically stuck in the last decade, the game mechanics sometimes give the impression that it is the final work of a pubescent from the two-week IT course in the youth culture center. In the same way, the player has to fight “waves of prehistoric beasts” in order to ultimately triumph over “the henchmen of your archenemy”.
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To introduce the plot, the player has to watch helplessly as the mother monkey is eaten for breakfast by a dinosaur, which will make little Kong seek revenge for the rest of the game. So the primate trudges across the graphically not very impressive island and beats up all sorts of beasts. The end of the story is as expected as the appearance of a clown in the circus: when the former monkey child has finally become a monster ready to fight, he faces his mother’s murderer. Shut up, dinosaur dead.
The rating of this completely unsuccessful video game even gave rise to a new term in the international nerd cosmos. The game is described as “Gollum-like”. An allusion to the second game from 2023, which is considered completely unplayable: “Lord of the Rings: Gollum” from the German development studio Daedalic Entertainment had to accept devastating reviews. “Irrecoverably lost and nasty defaced,” was the verdict of “Gamestar” magazine in a review.
The ability to program complex games without much effort using the “Unreal Engine 5” programming tool opens up new avenues for failure. The extraction shooter “The Day Before” is a negative example of this. Announced as an extensive open-world survival game with hordes of zombies to fight, the game produced by the developer studio Fntastic was taken off the Steam sales platform just a few days after publication. The graphics fell far short of expectations, the technical condition regularly caused the game to crash, and some players reported that they couldn’t even start the game on their computer. Most buyers received their money back, and the studio announced its disbandment four days after release.
The production company insists they only had the best intentions in mind. “We really wanted to release new patches to unlock the game’s full potential, but unfortunately we don’t have the money to continue the work,” she explained on her channels. This cannot be verified. A player’s criticism was answered with a note: “Shit happens.”
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