GameSided Roundtable: Things The Industry Gets Away With

Greetings! This is our weekly GameSided Roundtable feature, where our writers converge to provide their opinions, wishes, statements or critical thought on one general topic centered around video games. Sometimes it can be funny, sometimes it can be serious. Contemporary, classic; we hope to cover a wide variety of things in this segment as a group. If you wish to submit an idea for a GameSided Roundtable discussion topic, you can leave the editor an email at: daniel.george@fansided.com. We’ll totally give you (and your Twitter account, if applicable) a shoutout!

This week’s GameSided Roundtable topic: “What aspect of gaming do you just not understand why it gets a free pass by the gaming community?” 

Daniel George (Twitter)

The very first handheld game I played was Pokemon Red. I got it with my brand new Gameboy Color, buying the game myself with the money I saved up from allowance. It was great to explore the world of Kanto with my Charmander starter, blasting through gym leaders and trying to catch ’em all. However, at 139 Pokemon caught, I arrived at an impasse on my journey to be the very best, like no one ever was. I had to trade with other kids at school using a link cable to finally arrive at 150 Pokemon captured.

Since those days, it’s always burned me deep inside to know that Nintendo and Game Freak get away with essentially selling two copies of almost the same game at once, with minimal gameplay differences between them. This does not extend to “third games” in each generation: Pokemon Yellow, Crystal and others offer enough gameplay changes that warrant their existence, and come often as a later release. However, there’s not really any need for a Pokemon Green and a Pokemon Red.

The link cable already made it possible for friends to battle it out, so the excuse of trying to give the link cable value won’t cut it for me. Plus, with Nintendo bundling Pokemon ORAS (Omega Red, Alpha Sapphire) together without a discount, saying that you’re not meant to buy both games doesn’t make sense, either. Nintendo is fully marketing the games so that you spend full price on two games with minimal gameplay differences, which may be required by early 20’s fans to do if they want to catch them all and have no like-minded friends.

In the recent years, we have seen the rise of Season Passes, Day 1 DLC, pre-order bonuses that you have to buy otherwise and tons of other monetization schemes. They rightly get criticized by all facets of media organizations and fans alike. That’s why it makes no sense that Game Freak has been utilizing an even worse scheme for decades and public outcry has not nearly been as recognized as it should be.

That’s not to say the games themselves aren’t great, by the way. They mostly are.

Keith Myers (Twitter)

Yearly editions that aren’t actually anything new: This has been a huge problem in sports games for decades. Almost every year, the new Madden is just a roster update and a fresh coat of paint. Of course they charge us full price for this “new” game too.

This problem isn’t just something that comes from EA and their sports titles either. The Ezio trilogy of Assassin’s Creed games had much of the same problem. They were all essentially the same game, just with a new story to drive the gamer to do that same things. All of these games were good in their own right, but paying full price for each one felt like I was getting ripped off.