Games that many gamers refuse to launch even out of curiosity – Tarkov, Rust, Fortnite, PUBG and soulslikes

Refusing to try a game is rarely about taste. More often it comes down to cold calculation: someone already knows how much time, patience, and money a game will demand, and decides not to open that door at all.

Sometimes ten minutes of a stream is enough to realize what follows isn't entertainment but a second job.

The clearest example is Five Nights at Freddy's. Scott Cawthon's series, which launched in 2014, revolves around checking cameras and shutting doors, and watching someone else play it gives you basically the entire experience.

The lore about missing children and possessed animatronics is genuinely more developed than the gameplay itself, with FNAF: Pizzeria Simulator standing as a rare exception – between nights, players actually have to run the pizzeria, so just sitting around waiting for a jumpscare stops being an option.

Escape from Tarkov from Battlestate Games works differently – it doesn't look boring, it looks like punishment. An extraction shooter with full gear loss on death, progress wipes, and raids where players get sniped thirty seconds after landing, it scares off even people who love it.

One veteran with 1500 hours logged summed it up better than any review could:

Do I regret it? Yes. Do I love it? Yes. Do I hate it? Yes. Will I play another 10 hours this week? Yes.

Monetization itself makes up its own category of refusal. Subscriptions in games like iRacing or World of Warcraft turn many players away not because of the price tag, but because of the principle – paying every month just to have a race ruined at the first turn doesn't sound appealing.

A common take was that a game should stick to one monetization method, not stack a subscription, a purchase price, a battle pass, and loot boxes all at once.

Rust and DayZ scare people off less through mechanics and more through the sheer scale of how addictive they get – the community has plenty of specific stories about people quitting jobs over server wipes.

Fortnite is a softer case, but somehow more frustrating: it started as a co-op survival game built around defending a base from zombies, and after PUBG took off, it turned into a battle royale, leaving fans who waited for the original version feeling like the game they wanted never showed up.

Soulslikes end up on the list for a different reason entirely – people play games to switch their brains off, not to die on the same boss fight twelve times in a row.