10 Overpriced Video Game BS You Should AVOID
9. The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum's Paywalled NPC Voice Acting
It's fair to say that publisher Nacon daring to charge $60 for their execrable The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is absolute bulls**t in its own right, but it somehow gets even worse than that.
Not content to merely ask top dollar for a deeply terrible game, Nacon also decided to try and squeeze a little more juice from the IP by gating Elven-language voice acting behind a paywall.
Though throughout the base game more prominent Elven characters do speak their native language of Sindarin, in order to hear all Elven NPCs speak the language, you needed to fork out an additional $10 for the game's "Precious Edition."
Developers Daedalic Entertainment tried to justify the extra cost by stressing that they "went the extra mile" by hiring specialist voice actors to perform the Sindarin dialogue, while insisting it was intended for "real Tolkien devotees who want to immerse themselves even more into the world of Middle-Earth."
Yet given that even the basic game still features some Sindarin dialogue, it does feel like a rather cheeky attempt to exploit the goodwill of fans by carving features out and selling them separately.