The practice or culture of designing games with maximum profit as the sole objective, at the expense of player experience, artistic integrity, or fair play. Greedy Gaming is mercenary gaming's more honest name: it's gaming driven by greed, pure and simple. It's the reason $70 games still have microtransactions, the reason "ultimate editions" cost $100, the reason you can pay to win. Greedy Gaming has normalized extraction, made exploitation expected. Players have learned to accept that games will try to squeeze them, that "free" means "costs more," that fun is now a product to be purchased in installments.
Example: "He looked at his game library—dozens of games, hundreds of dollars, and still he felt like he owned nothing. Greedy Gaming had made every purchase a rental, every game a service. He wasn't a player; he was a subscriber. The fun was temporary; the extraction was permanent."
by Abzugal February 21, 2026
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