Hidden costs
The true cost of a purchase is revealed late, or never.
- Code
- I1
- Category
- Informational / interface
- Severity
- Medium
- Evidence
- ModerateCanonical dark pattern carried into games.
- Purpose served
- Serves businessPrimarily serves the provider's revenue, retention, or data — the most suspect.
- Mechanism family
- Sneaking / Hiding
- Platforms
- Mobile / F2P · PC / console
- Player costs
- Financial
- Modes
- Deceptive
- Target Audience
- policymakers
- Tags
- hidden coststransparencypricingserves businessdeceptive communicationlow transparencyconsent underminedmonetary pressurecognitive pressurevulnerability exploitation
- Also known as
- drip pricing, late-revealed costs
How it works
Additional charges, currency conversions, or requirements appear only after the player is committed.
Why it can be harmful
Withholding a material fact about price deceives the player and undermines informed consent.
Examples in the wild
- A 'free' item that needs paid currency to use
- Game shop costs that surface only at the final step
Illustrative genre examples to aid recognition — not allegations about specific titles.
References
- Mathur, A.; Acar, G.; Friedman, M. J.; Lucherini, E., et al. (2019). Dark patterns at scale: Findings from a crawl of 11K shopping websites. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW). doi.org/10.1145/3359183 · citing patterns
- Bank, D. (2023). Problematic monetization in mobile games in the context of the human right to economic self-determination. Computers in Human Behavior. doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2023.107958 · citing patterns
Related patterns
Comparison prevention
Making it hard to compare prices, odds, or options so players can't judge value.
Hidden / undisclosed odds
The probability of outcomes in a paid randomised reward is withheld, buried, or hard to verify.
Personalised spend-optimisation
Silently using a player's behavioural data to tune offers, prices, odds, difficulty, or matchmaking to maximise that individual's spending.
Premium-currency obfuscation
Real money is converted into in-game currency at non-round ratios that break the player's price intuition.
Bad defaults / preselection
The provider-preferred option is already selected or treated as the normal path, so inaction becomes consent, spending, or data sharing.
Fake social proof
Fabricated or unverifiable signals of others' activity — “1M players bought this!”, fake live counters — used to pressure decisions.