What are some video games you avoid?

Anything from EA.
Anything from Ubisoft
Anything Epic exclusive.
Anything with Denuvo (or whatever is the next intrusive DRM).
Anything competitive PvP multiplayer.
Anything "free" to play.
Probably almost all general multipler & live service by now - or otherwise full of dark patterns to keep me "engaged".

I don't find myself "engaged," I find myself wanting to spend money for something that will bore me the next week.

There is a reason I've mostly played single player games for the past decade.

I was tired of the "seasons" and micro transactions when I just wanted a story. If the story was good, I'd be ok with purchasing an expansion upon it. I remember my first expansion pack, Warcraft 2, played over a phone line. It felt worth it.

For more modern games, The Witcher 3 DLC felt like proper expansion packs. I have no bad feelings about those.

But just adding a few cosmetic items? Fuck off.

Most of the multiplayer ones and all of the ones that require voice chat.

There are so many interesting games I see that require internet multiplayer and voice chat. I would love to play them with friends but do not want to interact with random people in a game.
- My beef is with the computer.
- Squad has this problem for the first 5 mins in the pregame bit before you can leave the base.
  
  Most of the interactions I've had after that period have been pretty positive
- xbox has shadowbanned me or something so that my game chat doesn’t work. I can hear others but they can’t hear me.
  
  I know it’s not a microphone issue because people can hear me in party chat.
  
  This sucks

Any game that uses kernel level anti cheat, for obvious reasons.

Sorry I'm dumb. What are the reasons? You really want to cheat?
- I'll assume since I am someone else, but kernel level anti-cheat is basically Spyware, or at least a privacy concern.
- Yep, the other two commenters summed it up well: I'd rather not have software for a game that I play running and phoning home every time I boot my computer (in other words, a rootkit). I also am a Linux user, so they just don't work for me.
- Can't play them on Linux
- Could also be that they are playing on Linux. Kernel level anti-cheat doesn’t work there.

anything that is a “Game as a Service”

EA and Ubisoft, some kernel level anti cheat, and typically speaking, i dont enjoy games that have tower defense mechanics (and i hate when its shoehorned in, e.g Monster Hunter Rise). Korean MMOs. Mobas in general

Pay to win games or games with heavy focus on in game purchases. Having an in game store to supplement development costs? Cool no problems. 5 interactions to get into a game but 1 interaction to purchase something? No thanks.

Not saying they can’t be fun. But not a practice I like to support if I can help it.

True, I had to spend money on some cosmetics on Injustice 2 once because that’s what Ed Boon wanted to put in his next DC fighting game that I read about which said he wanted to incorporate first-person shooter mechanics and trends into said game.

The first Injustice had none of that besides the downloadable content.

Standard 3D shooter/War games like your Call of Duties, Battlefields, etc.... It's not that I'm a prude per se, I'll happily play a single player campaign similar settings if they respect the material. Though I prefer science fiction where what I'm killing is aliens, or Fallout raiders and Super Mutants, or Zombies, etc...

But (and this is MY OPINION only...I don't judge anyone who feels differently) there's something creepy and wrong about using very realistic modern-day set human-to-human war shooters when the end result is to tea-bag your friend when you kill him and have 13 year old kids calling out slurs in open chat. It just denigrates and cheapens a subject matter that I think should be treated with a lot more solemnity and respect.

As a teen, I was told that playing Mortal Kombat would turn me into a serial killer. Now, as an adult with kids (one of which is an adult) I'm happy to report that I'm probably one of the most docile people you'll meet.

(Unless someone seriously hurts my family and/or cats.)

I used to have fun with Call of Duty, and I never saw it as "I am a soldier and I must kill these people." Every game needs a theme, and that just happened to be it. I just saw it as a competition of dexterity and strategy. Whether it's soldiers with guns or a yellow circle munching on ghosts, it's all just tapping buttons at the right time.

The reasons I quit playing CoD were because I got sick of buying the same game every year, and as I got older, I couldn't keep up with the kids. During the 12-25 year old range, your reaction time is WAY better than any other time.
- Oh no no. That's not what I mean. Its not about that old chestnut of "It'll make kids violent!" (It won't)
  
  its just realistic, modern war games against realistic depictions of contemporary humans is just something that I find distasteful to be used as "goofy fun with friends"
  
  Its like playing paintball in a church.
Agree, the suspension of disbelief is important when your are emulating conflicts similar to the way that people do in meat space.

Playing as a realisticly depicted person shooting another realisticly depicted person cant be good for your mental health.

online games.

Anything from EA, Microsoft, or Ubisoft.

Remember when all three of these companies used to be great 20 years ago? Such a shame how far they’ve fallen.

I’m playing Beyond Good & Evil on GameCube for the first time, and this game is an absolute gem. Makes me miss how great Ubisoft used to be. They started turning into hostile trash somewhere around ten years ago.
- Microsoft was always cold blooded, you probably just weren't aware of it. Microsoft lost an anti-trust case and was almost broken up in 1998 for its practices, but appealed and came to an agreement with the government.
Add Sony too

Online multiplayer and soulslike games

More pvp souls for me weee

Sports games, most racing games, JRPGs, fighting games, party games, MMOs, soulsborne type games, precision platformers, dating sim games. None of these are inherently bad, I've just learned that I don't get much out of them.

Damn, are you me?
- yea
I'm curious what Soulsborne games you've tried? I was absolutely certain they weren't for me, but I finally broke down and tried Dark Souls 3 cooperatively with friends. Not only is it my favorite genre now, but playing it that way was also the best gaming experience of my life.
- Bloodborne, Dark Souls 3, and God Of War. The genre just isn't for me. I am bad at, and get frustrated with trying to get perfect timing against enemies to trade melee attacks. Simple as. The genre isn't inherently bad, but I recognize when something isn't for me.

99.999% of them. I don't desire variety. Give me one good game and I'll waste infinite hours with it for the next 15 years. The newest game I've played is from 2018

I'd love it you'd name a few. I like games you can get lost in for hours and always looking for others I may have missed.
- Age of Empires 2, Minecraft, Cities Skylines, GTA series, DayZ

All multiplayer games for over a decade

People are assholes and I just wanna have fun

Anything multiplayer.

Anything that doesn't work on Linux

So, most games, then?
- No. As you can see on protondb.com, 86% of the Top 1000 Games on Steam have a Silver rating or better, meaning they work just fine on Linux.

MOBAs

I've tried and bounced off several mobas at the request of my friends over the years, but Deadlock is really pulling me in recently. I was surprised too.
- Same thing here
- Same thing.

Any game mobile advertised on Youtube, if it was good they would not need to advertise

Anything episodic or with an online social component. Basically anything that leeches significant time from my life. I don't want to be in my deathbed thinking about how many thousands of hours I spent on various games.

People bragging about having 5,000+ hours in a single video game make me deeply sad.

I think its quite cool if you still enjoy something after so many hours.

Gacha games.

I play Genshin Impact and one gacha is enough for me.

Fortnite. Noped right out of that one.

sports games, always online games, games with denuvo still on, mmo, party games, shooter games where the main focus is PvP, picture-puzzle games, find-in-picture games, games with 30% or more QTE that is not rhythm games

At the moment basically anything competitive/ranked. I don't want to compete online anymore because I know that I'll have to go on an insane grind to get good. Only exception is trackmania because it somehow doesn't upset me quite like other ranked online games. But even then I only play the "arcade" mode and not ranked

Oh, interesting. Why doesn't it upset you? Any particular mechanism?
- I think it'd because the Trackmania arcade mode doesn't really let you affect anyone else. Everyone in the server is obviously trying to go as fast as possible,and to a degree also get as high up on the session leaderboard as possible, but you can't ruin each others laps. And while finishing high on the session leaderboard is nice, the overall goal for everyone is to get a good enough time on the map in general. To beat your own PB, to get all medals. So essentially the real opponent is your past self. This leads people to get quite cooperative. Having discussions about how to tackle certain parts of the track, congretulating each other with setting a new PB, etc.
  
  Playing against random people and especially with random people in other competitive games seems to generally get toxic. People blaming you for ruining their game, people getting mad. To me it's very stressful. Even if I know that it shouldn't affect me, and I'm never going to meet them again, it still does affect me negatively

Anything Nintendo. Fuck Nintendo.

Anything with a subscription is a no for me. I think subscription games are less popular than they used to be, but I never played WoW because paying every month seemed excessive to me.

Most shooters. Especially like CoD. Not interested. I enjoy the original doom, but that's cartoony violence fighting demons. Some of the far cry games I've enjoyed, with some reservations.

Almost all free to play games. They don't feel like an honest deal most of the time. Like, Warframe was good somehow. But a lot of them feel predatory or annoying.

Purely pvp games. No mobas or battle royales for me. I don't want to deal with other people like that. A little pvp in a game, like dark souls, is fine. But I'm not looking for that to he the main thing, typically.

League

General war and military style games. When I was younger, my favorite game was battlefield but as I got older, I lost interest in such games. I much prefer simulation and strategy games, abd games that are more relatable.

Moba, mmorpg, and COD

Same. Until valve made deadlock. Damn you valve

I just can't do overwatch... I don't know why people give games like that enjoying...

Soulsborne type games

Games feeling like a chore and force me to 'get good' in order to enjoy them? Miss me with that shit, or at least pay me for it.

Online games

Same as above, plus annoying people who take the whole thing too seriously.

Anything along the lines of Civ, Stellaris. I have no self control with that type of game. It's the only type of game where I could go hours skipping everything healthy for the body.

Anything from Ubisoft. I’ll still consider an EA game. It’s that fucking bad the garbage that Ubisoft puts out and the shitty practices they hold towards the people who have been fans forever and monetarily supporting them.

Fuck them.

Closed-source games.

Which open source games do you play?
- I would rate all of these, as worth a try:
  
  Shattered Pixel Dungeon
  
  Cube2:Sauerbraten
  
  SGT-Puzzles
  
  Andor's Trail
  
  AssaultCube
  
  Minetest
  
  Neverball/Neverputt
  
  PowderToy
  
  0ad
  
  Fillets-ng
  
  Anuto TD
  
  Xmoto/Bloboats
  
  Flightgear
  
  Kobo Deluxe
  
  Enigma (oxyd)
  
  LiquidWar5
  
  H-Craft Championship
  
  Numpty Physics
  
  Wesnoth
  
  The Dark mod
  
  Have completed SuperTuxKart, BlobWars 1&2, Flare, Frozen Bubble, Hex-a-Hop, Holotz's Castle, SearchAndRescue II, Alex the Alligator, Project:Starfighter, Stormbaan Coureur, Trigger, etc
  
  Used to enjoy Red Eclipse1.6, before it was retired.
  
  I'm looking for the name of a FLOSS Quake1-mod, puzzle game, that was about placing gravity points to curve a stream of particles around the level, and eventually into the goal target. (May have used irrlicht) If anyone knows the name of this one, please let me know, it is my white-whale of games.
  
  Can find details about most of the above games here:
  
  https://libregamewiki.org/List_of_games
  
  FLOSS gaming is excellent, thanks to all these devs and asset creators.
- I would recommend Unciv. It's a Civ5 clone that is surprisingly feature filled. Written in Java so you can play on desktop or Android.
  
  There is also FreeCiv but it tries to clone Civ2 which has dated mechanics by todays standards (but a lot of fans still I guess).
- That’s a secret

Crafting ones.

Laughs in abiotic factor

Roguelikes. The infinite replayability and computer generated design are fatiguing to me. Seems like most of the reasons why people like them are the exact reasons I don't. 🤷‍♂️

For me it's the fact that most of them aren't actually able to be beaten on any given run.
- This. I'm OK with permadeath (and in game), but when a game is setup in such a way that most playthroughs just aren't winnable, even by someone with perfect knowledge, I hate them.

I echo a lot of the sentiments expressed by others about avoiding games from bad publishers or games employing milking practices, avoiding multiplayer and toxic people, overly hard games, and many other points already stated.

My two things that are different are that I enjoy hard games so long as the reset is instant or near instant. Like Katana Zero and Hotl8ne Miami. Without that I don't want any part of a hard game. I get it, I died, let me try again already. So fuck games with long reset times.

And more unusual is I really don't like most isometric games but especially clicky isometrics. If I can't wander freely with WASD, fuck it, I'm out. Not going to sit here going clickclickclickclickclickclick just to go half a screen and open a chest. Fucking hate overly clicky shit like that with a passion. I also dont like how up is more like diagonal up and left is diagonal up etc. It's just annoying. My only exceptional has been project zomboid.

I like Project Zomboid too!

CoD, overwatch, sports games, free to play games, casino games.

FPSs with the sole exception being Fallout 4. I don't know how people can tell that a single pixel moving far off in the distance is the enemy. And what do you mean someone's shooting me from behind at exactly 161.8°? How can you tell? HOW?

A lot of the time, the answer is actually cheating
Fallout 4 is an FPS and not an RPG?
- I'm not sure how you're defining FPS but to me it's a mix of both.
- I actually had more fun with FO3 when I fought battles like an FPS instead of like an RPG with VATS or whatever.
- It is an RPG that has blurred the line into FPS with its mechanics to the point where it has so much of both that trying to put it into a single category is pointless.
I don't know if this answers your question, but I was very good at Where's Wally as a child.

Games made by Bethesda, EA, Ubisoft, or Paradox.

Anything multiplayer, free-to-play and/or gacha. Nowadays I also avoid FromSoftware and anything trying to ape them, I used to love these kind of games but I just don't have the patience and fortitude for them anymore.

Oh and Nintendo, then again it's easy to avoid them considering I haven't owned one of their consoles since the Game Cube.

I avoid Nintendo too. They are way too litigious and imo actively hate their fans. There are too many instances of fans that make something out of love and for free, that nintendo comes up and sues the pants off of. Also they never put their games on sale which is just a dick move.

They are becoming the gaming version of Disney to me. They try to look squeaky clean and family friendly, but are actually a really horrible and sad group of people that are losing the ability to innovate and only really "win" by suing everything into the ground and being greedier than the next guy.
- Nintendo is Japanese Disney. Pikachu is Japanese Mickey.

Multiplayer anything, dating sims, roguelikes. I will play single player games that offer multiplayer but never the multiplayer part. Oh and gatcha games, waifu collectors, etc. and anything p2w. Fuck that noise.

What's wrong with rougelikes in your opinion? I don't usually seek them out, but for a good while I was super addicted to Binding of Isaac. I think the gameplay loop is pretty fun.

The rest of your comment I agree with wholeheartedly.

These days damn near anything that costs more than 30. Because the extra money isn't enough, they want to sell you $5000 in hats, too.

These days anything with a story honestly.

If I want a story I'll watch TV with my wife. When I play games I'd rather pay something short and fun, like a round of deadlock recently.

Any dev's online game that does not want to support Linux in their AC for whatever reason, even if it is a matter of just flipping a goddam switch.

Yup. Got locked out myself since I only play on a linux machine. Yeah rockstar you can fuck right off.

MOBA games, I spent years playing heroes of newerth and Dota2, but as I got older and had less time to play it got increasingly harder to keep up with all the changes, and I realised it was just making me stressed playing it rather than enjoying it. Still enjoyed watching The International for a few years after I quit though.

Multiplayer games that require invasive anticheat or really long games that take 100+ hours to complete.

At this point, anything that isn't Smash Brothers or Apex Legends.

I'm gonna make a microtransaction-laden gambling trap competitive multiplayer dating sim, get EA to publish it, and title it "🖕"

I think that's just called "reality".

Anything Ubisoft

F2P, RTS, and anime games

And RTS? For the same reason or different?

Well, ever since the whole thing where macrohard/mojangles/whichever decided "you know what minecraft needs? CLIENT SIDE CHAT SCANNING AND CENSORSHIP!" I decided to switch over to Minetest and have never looked back.

I don't mind big servers having censorship because that's their deal and they can use whatever chat filters/plug-ins they want, but do we really need singleplayer to be censored? Or our chat messages to be scanned for things mc deem inappropriate? Absolutely not!

Team Multiplayer in general. There's nothing fun about getting yelled at and in some cases banned for not playing the meta.

gothic 3. because it looks like piece of shit.

Sonic.exe

That’s a creepypasta, not a real video game.
- Probably a sign I've been avoiding it well, if I didn't even know it didn't actually exist.

Wrong comment.