#3: PUBG
The number 3 most popular game is the second newest game on this list, released in 2017 the game is Player Unknowns Battleground aka PUBG is a battle royale arena which means that there's a hundred players that drop into a zone and only one survives PUBG is the most popular game currently on Steam. It currently has 2.7 million concurrent players.

#4: Minecraft
 A video game I'm sure you've heard of at least once before it's called Minecraft. This  indie game which was developed by Notch in 2009 has exploded and as of January 21st 2018 minecraft still claims over 74 million monthly active users this includes players on PC, mobile and console and I personally don't see this game falling off anytime soon because there's always another kid born who wants to play with blocks

 

No one can tell you what you can or cannot do, with no rules to follow.  This adventure it's up to you

#5 Counter Strike
Conter Strike is a first-person shooter with a very competitive gaming scene called Counter Strike Global Offensive this game which was released in 2012 is currently the second most popular game on Steam, and even during the week the game has a daily peak concurrent player base of over 600,000 strong.

#6:Dota 2

One of the most popular video games in 2018 is one of two mobas on this list called Dota 2, released in 2012, Dota 2 still has an average concurrent player account of nearly 500,000 and has a peak this month of nearly 800,000.


Dota 2 is also still one of the more popular games on Twitch it's

#7: Hearthstone
Another game from Blizzard called Hearthstone Heroes of Warcraft which was released in 2013 and is a card game based on the World of Warcraft


Hearthstone is the first game on this list that's free to play but trust me, it's not the last, as free-to-play games seem to be some of the most popular in today's market which makes sense since you don't have to pay for them at least not until the game sucks you in and then if you're like me you end up spending tons of money on dress-up or PACs or whatever else the game has to sell after you're already invested.


Hearthstone recently broke its concurrent active player record in late 2017 with its last expansion and boasts over 71 million users

#8: OverWatch
Released by Blizzard in 2016, this game boasts around 35 million monthly active players and is a massive driving force for Blizzards continued growth and popularity. This game is also the first game on this list but it's going to become a common theme of competitive games that have professional players and an active competitive scene which seems to be a driving force for maintaining games popularities long after they've been released.

#9: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege
Released in 2015, in the last 24 hours it's concurrent peak is over 120 thousand players just on PC, which is close to its all-time peak of a hundred and thirty two thousand which is crazy because, this means Tom Clancy's Rainbow six siege is the most popular it's ever been even though it was released three years ago in 2015

#10: GTA V
The 10th most popular game in the world in 2018 is Rockstar Games, Grand Theft Auto 5.


This open-world "do whatever you want" title was released in 2013 and still has 83,000 peak concurrent active users just on PC with the majority of its players still playing on Xbox and Playstation. The game is already 5 years old but it might come as a surprise that most of the games on this list are as old or older than Grand Theft Auto 5

Hello guys, straight to the point, we are counting down the top 10 most popular video games in 2018.


Now let's get into the top 10, this list is gonna be ranking the most popular games based off of concurrent and monthly active users concurrent users of the number of players a game has at any given time, the number of players logged in at once, monthly active players and the number of users that log in and play at least one game every month.


It's important to note that not every game releases both statistics so at certain points here, I'm looking at one games monthly active users and another, games daily concurrent users and it makes it a little difficult to compare but I did my best so enjoy

What are the worst offenders of straight-up lying to the public? Let us know in the comments!

lalasticlala, cao, Mynd44, mobilegees

#1: No Man's Sky

The most recent and perhaps most egregious example of a developer lying to its audience, No Man’s Sky may well prove to be the straw that broke the E3 hype train’s back.
In a series of visually stunning gameplay demos, Hello Games sold No Man’s Sky as a space exploration game in which ‘anything could happen’. It was a universe of 18 quintillion planets, with you at its centre.


The finished product left a lot to be desired, and was curiously missing some core gameplay elements that had been teased by Hello Games’ Sean Murray. Instead of the open-world sci-fi epic we were promised, No Man’s Sky was a fairly middling, survival-crafting game, albeit with its procedurally generated elements turned up to eleven. A lot of players were hit with glitches, frequent texture pop-ins, and even game-breaking bugs upon launch, which led to speculation about the legitimacy of the game’s E3 demos.


Worst of all, players were confused to find no multiplayer component within the game. Sean Murray had stated on several occasions that No Man’s Sky would include multiplayer lobbies, and that players could meet each other on different planets.

When such features never materialised, the backlash was insane, albeit not entirely unprovoked.

2. Aliens: Colonial Marines

Colonial Marines will forever remain the game that was finally
going to give xenomorph fans the game they deserved, only to release as a buggy trash fire; a murky and slapdash piece of software cobbled together with seemingly no consideration for what made the Alien franchise work in the first place.


Upon release, the internet was flooded with videos depicting dancing xenomorphs, broken AI and muddy textures. This would have been bad enough in isolation, but considering that the game we had been sold at E3 2012 was so radically different to the one filling up trade-in shelves, emotions started to morph from confusion and disappointment to pure anger.


For a start, the game fans bought was missing a lot of the textures, shadowing, dynamic lighting and cinematics that had been trailed at E3, and comparison videos by the likes of
Videogamer served as damning indictments of developers Gearbox Software.
.
What the hell happened to Aliens : Colonial Marine
The inevitable fallout was something to behold. The debacle almost cost Gearbox its credibility, as fans rushed to decry CEO Randy Pitchford as a liar and a con man. YouTuber and reviewer Jim Sterling launched a barrage of criticisms and investigative reports at the developer, who eventually wound up getting sued for false advertising.


Insider sources eventually revealed that significant portions of the game had been outsourced to other developers, while Gearbox shifted their workforce over to Borderlands. Gearbox has categorically denied these accusations, but have been completely unable to provide a sufficient explanation as to why the release version of Colonial Marines was so much worse than the game they had had convinced people to buy.

#3: KillZone 2

It’s hard to believe that anyone fell for this one, but back in 2005 we weren’t quite so savvy. Killzone 2’s reveal trailer at E3 was far too glossy to have been comprised of in-game footage, and later was revealed to be a “target render” - a video package designed to accurately portray what the finished product would look like. Assumedly, Guerrilla Games did not yet possess footage they deemed worthy of showing to the public.


This still happens nowadays. Star Wars Battlefront was sold on the basis of an ‘in-engine trailer’ that demonstrated what the game would look like, and generally how it would play. The difference is, most trailers of this kind are clearly watermarked as ‘NOT GAMEPLAY FOOTAGE’, or something to that effect.
Killzone 2 actually wound up looking fairly similar to its pre-render, mainly because animation quality and graphical fidelity improved a lot between 2005 and the time of the game’s release in 2008. The key difference is the play character’s first-person animations, which are just plain unnatural.

#4: Tom Clancy's The Division

The Division’s first act of truth-manipulation appears in its name. Like the majority of games attributed to Tom Clancy, the acclaimed author actually had very little to do with development on The Division (he passed away three years before it was released).


But that’s not the only way Ubisoft pulled the wool over our eyes. Like Watch_Dogs before it, the finished version of The Division was graphically inferior to footage first shown at E3 2013. The differences weren’t quite as glaring as those we’d seen a year earlier, but the trailer itself did come with some of its own unique quirks, namely the inclusion of scripted ‘in-game chat’.


This is a fairly new trend within E3 reveals, but we’ve already seen it co-opted by the likes of Rainbow Six Siege. Rather than have players showcasing the game live in order to record their genuine experiences, voice actors are hired to dub lines over already embellished footage.


In yet another example of Ubisoft playing fast and loose with the truth, The Division’s creative director Magnus Jansen stated that the game would not contain micro-transactions. Surprise surprise, the game has micro-transactions.


Add to that the fact that servers struggled to cope with the game’s player-base on launch (people were actually queuing up to use a laptop in the first mission area), and Ubisoft’s initial promise of a beautiful, seamless online open world starts to sound more and more like fiction.

#5: Mass Effect 3

Mass Effect 3 is a dramatically rich, cinematic action-RPG, and one of the best games of 2012 - that is, if you skip the last fifteen minutes and do something else instead.
Everyone knows the tale of Mass Effect 3's 'crucial story relegated to DLC' setup by now, and regardless of how maddeningly stupid the ‘Star Child’ ending was, fans were most angry about having a 100+ hour epic reduced to a game of ‘pick a card, any card.’


The game’s director, Casey Hudson, had gone on record as saying that the ending would be greatly affected by your choices up until that point, although it’s entirely possible that his vague proclamations were simply misinterpreted. ME3’s final, galaxy-shattering battle did change depending on your decisions - as well as your multiplayer exploits - but the fifteen minutes that followed said battle followed a pretty strict and linear path.


People didn’t exactly react with grace and poise though. While some tried to explain away the events of the ending with the admittedly solid ‘indoctrination theory’, others hurled abuse at BioWare, or sent red, green and blue cupcakes to their offices as a snide gesture of contemp

#6: Watch Dogs

No matter how many times it happens, it will always be perplexing to discover that a developer has embellished gameplay footage for the purpose of hype. Ubisoft is no stranger to the concept; Far Cry 3 and Rainbow Six Siege are prime examples of games that wound up aesthetically inferior to their E3 reveals, but Watch_Dogs still stands out as the company’s most heinous offender.


Although the retail version of Watch_Dogs remained mechanically intact, its visuals had been severely hamstrung since the game’s 2012 reveal . After several development delays, fans were shocked to find the finished product looking vastly inferior to videos that had sold them on the concept.
Gone was the wind, dust, and smoke seen in the reveal, and the game’s glossy, neon-tipped blacks and blues had been replaced by a murky layer of brownish-grey, as though Aiden Pierce had draped his coat over your TV.


People felt betrayed, because they had worked themselves into a furore over what appeared to be the most ground-breaking open world game since Grand Theft Auto III. But if Watch_Dogs had been revealed via more accurate trailers, it would probably still have generated significant hype.
The game did look impressive in 2014, just not E3 2012 impressive. Because nothing could. Because that game didn’t exist.

#7: Spore

Expectations were high going into Spore, not least because it was the latest game from The Sims designer Will Wright.
EA made plenty of lofty claims about Spore’s procedural generation too, and in Wright’s GDC 2005 demonstration of the game, he revealed several gameplay features that were eventually cut. While this tends to happen a lot throughout the course of game development, it’s staggering just how many parts of the demo only got as far as the cutting room floor.
Spore’s creatures looked a lot more realistic back in 2005, when compared with their more comical 2008 counterparts. There were also features like underwater life and editing tools that were completely removed.

This isn’t as knowingly dishonest as showing off false gameplay footage that you know doesn’t represent your final product, but it is careless. Teasing your game at such an early stage in its life cycle is bound to leave people feeling disappointed when it ultimately undergoes changes.
Perhaps in this instance, a non-gameplay CGI trailer would have been preferabl

#8: Dead Island 2
Perhaps it’s unfair to say that Dead Island was sold on an outright lie, but it was certainly marketed as something it wasn’t.


Dead Island’s cinematic trailer is still one of the greatest of its kind, a slow-motion heartbreaker that depicts a vacationing family’s fatal encounter with a zombie horde. A masterclass in marketing, it planted expectations for a touching game about family survival.



But that’s not what Dead Island was. Dead Island was a janky, co-op shooter with surprisingly moreish melee combat and some fairly terrible matchmaking capabilities. That’s not to say it wasn’t fun, but it certainly wasn’t the tear-jerker we had been led to believe. The game lacked the one thing its trailer was built upon: a story.

10. Fable: The Journey

Peter Molyneux deserves his own section on this list, but for the sake of brevity, it’s best to focus on his most easily digestible untruths. The Fable creator has a long and depressing history when it comes to telling porkies.

Godus - Molyneux’s recent return to the god-game genre – spectacularly failed to deliver on its most infamous promise, that the winner of Curiosity: What’s Inside the Cube? would appear in the game as an all-powerful deity. Even the original Fable, a game that was otherwise very well received, shall forever be synonymous with broken promises.

While hyping his new fantasy franchise, Peter went a little off book, and proclaimed that if players knocked an acorn from a tree, a new tree would grow there in its place. The feature never materialised in the game, but it did serve as the seed for all of Molyneux’s future fibs.

His most blatant lie came while promoting Fable: The Journey, a Kinect exclusive game about riding a horse and cart. Molyneux claimed on several occasions that the game wouldn’t be ‘on rails’, but players were unsurprised to find that The Journey was indeed, completely linear.

Forget Banshees, armoured tanks and Metal Gears; the hype train is one of the most unstoppable vehicles in gaming history. No matter how hard we try to tame our excitement for the next big releases, most of us wind up buying a ticket on the railroad of disappointment.

Fans get burned time after time, drawn in by dazzling CGI cinematics or supposed 'in-engine teasers’ that don’t truly represent a given studio’s finished product. Though the end fault might lie with us as petulant and undiscerning consumers, it begins with the publishers and marketers who sell their wares based on pure fabrication.

While there’s no excuse for raving tantrums about how a dishonest video game trailer ‘ruined your life’, there’s also no defence for a company that brazenly lies to your face whilst pocketing your cash.

E3 alone has a sordid history when it comes to misleading trailers and soundbites, and while such practices might succeed in securing initially high sales, the resulting backlash is often far more trouble than it’s worth.

http://whatculture.com/gaming/10-video-games-that-were-sold-on-lies

1. You’re The One And Only Hero Because… Reasons

Prime Offender: Mass Effect, Deus Ex

Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some – almost invariably in video games – have greatness thrust upon them. In the real world, heroes tend to be one of the first two (you know, soldiers, leaders, philosophers, that sort of thing).

Out in videogamesland, pretty much anyone can be a hero, for just about every contrived reason you can name.

Usually this involves in them cartoonishly stumbling and bumbling into a MacGuffin that enhances their lowly human powers, or they witness an event that miraculously transforms them from Joe Schmo into Joe Hero. It’s a lovely, lazy Mary Sue piece of fiction.

Because in games, champions aren’t always born; they’re created through manufactured plot points, allowing gamers to identify with this apparently ordinary individual in extraordinary times.

Lalasticlala Seun Mynd44

2. The Enemy Knows Where You Are Because The Story Demands It

Prime Offender: Outlast, Resident Evil, Alien Isolation

Event triggers in games aren’t new. It’s a way of advancing the story based on a gamer’s actions. You complete a puzzle or section of the map, which tells the game to activate an enemy.

But while some games give a believable reason for a bad guys to locate you – you know, you make a noise and disturb them – some games are so keen to propel the plot forward that the simple matter of silently picking up a key causes an enemy that wasn’t in your vicinity to suddenly appear.

Cue the unfair jump scare and a boss fight.

And gamers cry, ‘How the hell did he know I was there?’ He knew, friends, because the story demanded it. Which is pretty cheap, when you think about it.

3. Your Sidekick’s Awesome Until…

Prime Offender: Mass Effect 2, ReCore

You know how it is. You assemble an awesomely powerful team who can kill and maim thousands of evil-doers over the course of the game and then…

And then, right out of nowhere, your companion struggles, goes down (and quite possibly dies – see ‘Kill the Cutie’).

That’s weird, because just minutes before this dude or dudette was kicking serious ass. And now, just because the story demands you save them, suddenly they can’t put one foot in front of the other without taking damage. It doesn’t fit their character, and it doesn’t fit with the hours of gameplay you’ve just sat through. Your companion, alas, has been cursed by the plot.

4. "This Is Super-Urgent" But…

Prime Offender: Fallout 4, Mass Effect 3, The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim

From a storytelling perspective, one of the major problems with open-world games is the fact that you have both the main questline - and about a thousand side-quests.

Take Fallout 4. Your son’s been kidnapped. That’s kind of a big deal, unless you’re literally the worst parent in the world. You need to save him, but – Ooh, look, this guy wants me to kill some bandits. And I need to build a house. And…

Ultimately, the player’s actions don’t match the loosely established character of the protagonist. As a game, that’s great – Bethesda can throw as many diversions as they want at us.

As a narrative though, it fails, because no parent is going to collect random junk when their kid is being held against their will - unless that parent is Dr. Henry Jones Sr. teaching his child self-reliance.

5. You Were The Bad Guy All Along

Prime Offender: Bioshock: Infinite, Spec Ops: The Line, Heavy Rain

WHAT?! Me?! I’m the baddie?! I did not see that coming.

Oh wait, yes I did. Because the ‘you were the bad guy all along’ cliché, or its cousin, ‘It was your fault all along’, has been done to death in video games.

It’s an attempt to add a Shyamalan-style twist to the proceedings; a rug pull in which everything you thought you knew – about the game and yourself – is a filthy lie.

That’s dandy if all the clues cleverly hint at what’s really going on, but it’s become a fallback for some games, designed to inject some extra tension at the expense of believability. What’s worse is when this cheap cliché is used to develop a character arc for someone who, beyond being an avatar for the player, has no real personality.

6. Boss Mutation

Prime Offender: Batman: Arkham Asylum, Resident Evil 2

In movies, there’s a rule that the bad guy always comes back for one last scare. In games, that rule has become ‘the bad guy always mutates for a second boss level.’

Doesn’t matter that it makes no sense in the context of the universe. Forget the fact that it doesn’t marry up with the plot. Just fight this guy one last time, not because the story needs this extra ten minutes to explain what’s going on, but because the studio thought it’d look pretty cool in the trailer.

It’s another lazy case of making a tired game last that little bit longer, when really, the credits should’ve already rolled.

7. You Need To Backtrack To Move Forward


Prime Offender: Halo 3, Castlevania

This cliché is an example of both lazy storytelling and lazy level design – which is pretty much the double-whammy of cardinal gaming sins.

My cold heart sinks every time I realise that, having just fought my way through a level, the developers have contrived a situation where I have to go through the level backwards for story purposes: ‘We need to you stay here and protect the MacGuffin…’

From a gameplay point-of-view, it’s just tedious; from a narrative perspective, it’s wholly unbelievable. Because there’s never, ever, ever a good reason to double-back on yourself.

Most games don’t even have the good grace to modify the level, in order to show how the world altered due to the story. Would it kill ‘em to add a collapsed building, panicked civilians or a few cars on fire?

At least that would explain to us why we’re back-tracking, rather than just artificially inflating the runtime.

8. Hold X To… [Do Something]


Prime Offender: Every Call of Duty game

Interaction is one of the key things in video games. But maintaining that while also delivering a decent narrative is a tricky thing to balance.

So what we end up with is a really stilted moment where to advance the plot, show emotion or carry out a scripted event – just about anything, really – is conducted by making us hold a button down.

‘Bam!’ Video game developers say, probably high-fiving each other, ‘We’ve just made our story engaging and interactive.’

Trouble is, gamers tend to do this sort of stuff on auto-pilot. Screen tells us to press a button, so we press it. We’re not thinking about why we’re doing it, or what our character is feeling at that moment, we’re just doing it to get to the next part of the game.

9. Your Choices Actually Mean Nothing

Prime Offender: Wolfenstein: New Blood, all Telltale games

Video games are a vehicle for empowerment. We feel like the heroes, in charge of our own destinies and controlling what happens in the universe. Makes sense, then, to offer choices, right?

Choices, after all, are what separates games from every other type of entertainment (with the notable exception of choose-your-own-adventure books).

But so often in games, those choices turn out to mean… nothing whatsoever. They have no impact on the story, or offer differences so minor that it would’ve been easier not to give us the damn choice in the first place.

Look, it’s not easy for developers to create scenarios in which every choice you make has a genuinely different outcome – but some sort of worthwhile impact would be much appreciated.

10. Killing The Cute Girl/Boy

Prime Offender: Titanfall 2, Final Fantasy VII

Need a quick and dirty emotional punch? Easy. Kill the super-loveable character - the one that audiences have grown to love over the course of a few hours.

It’s sad, when you think about it, that the only way developers think we can connect with a story is by offing the cutest character in the game. There are so many ways to create an emotional bond, to stir investment in the plot, that this just feels like the easy way out. It requires zero thought.

Zero effort. Just pick the best sidekick and write him or her out of the script – preferably with a death scene that callously plucks at all the emotional chords without ever putting in the hard work.

Typically, this occurs to show you just how evil the bad guy is (as if we hadn’t guessed), or to force the protagonist to act. Or both. This is base-level storytelling; the emotional equivalent of waking up and discovering it was all a dream.

Video games can get real lazy in their storytelling, falling back in clichés we’ve experienced a thousand times before. Clichés so well-worn and familiar, in fact, that you can probably guess what’s going to happen before it occurs.

Often that’s down to narrative taking a backseat to gameplay, and when you stumble across these lazy stories, it leaves you wondering why the game even had a plot to begin with.

That said, Super Mario Bros. managed just fine without deep storytelling. You’re a plumber. You need to save a princess. Job done.

Why are you a plumber? Why has Daisy been kidnapped? Who cares, crack on with this super-awesome platformer. And that's cool.

It's the games with narrative pretensions for the lowest common denominator that need to quit. The ones that deliver super-simplistic crowd-pleasers that appeal to, and are understood by, the broadest possible player base. So forget about nuance, forget about memorable character arcs - just hurry along to the next gameplay sequence where stuff gets blown up.

These are the absolute worst clichés in video games – you know, the ones that really need stop, like, right now.

Oh, and watch out for minimal spoilers along the way.
http://whatculture.com/gaming/10-storytelling-cliches-in-video-games-that-need-to-die