History Main / MoneyForNothing

** The latest installment of the series, ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoIV'', features this trope in full-force. The series has done away with purchasable savehouses and businesses and has significantly toned-down the customization aspect from ''San Andreas''. Pay N' Sprays have become far less useful and eating is no longer necessary. Consequently, the $500,000+ the player possesses by the end of the story is basically just for show (not to mention how despite this, Niko keeps bitching about how he needs the money before missions. One has to wonder the sheer size of Roman's debts...)

** In ''Grand Theft Auto 3'', the easiest method of obtaining astronomical levels of wealth involves spawning a Tank and simply driving anywhere. As cars crash into the indestructible juggernaut, each explosion will inexplicably grant you money. Do this as long as you want to gain as much money as you need.

* Spending money on items in ''VideoGame/{{Bayonetta}}'' is a waste. Since you come across plentiful components for item crafting in the pause menu, which costs NOTHING, and actually using said items will only detract from your post mission score. However, there are several things that your stockpiled money can be used for, like a certain cheat that lets you unlock particular weapons that otherwise can only be gained by beating the game on certain difficulty levels, and in one case, by beating an INSANELY difficult bonus boss.

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** In a complete inversion, ''MonkeyIsland2'' starts you off with more money than you could possibly ever use. Almost immediately, it's all stolen from you. You get more later on, and can spend some or all of it on random knickknacks at a certain shop, only a few of which are actually useful.

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* ''SaintsRow 3'' gives you money based on how many neighbourhoods you own. At the start, you struggle to buy ammo and armour up a single car. Forget about character upgrades. By the time the money starts rolling in, you have every upgrade you need and anything after that is either overkill or outright [[GameBreaker cheating]].
** Throughout the entire ''Saints Row'' series, you do earn realistic amounts of money but everything you can spend money on is insanely cheap. $10 for a grenade, $50 for a guided missile, $300 to fix up your ride after an encounter with a tank, $500 to repair and deliver the car you just drove off a cliff (itself unnecessary since fresh vehicles are free from your garage), $5000 to ''buy a store'' and $1000 for a full vehicle upgrade including a more powerful engine, ram bumpers, armour plating, nitrous and pearlescent paint. The only things with remotely realistic price points are fast food, new cars at Foreign Power (if you can't be bothered to drive around for 15 minutes and steal one) and ''some'' cribs. The six figure crib upgrade prices in the third game seem realistic until you realise what you are actually buying for that money is not just a new posh interior as in earlier games but the ''demolition of the entire building and construction of a hundred floor skyscraper in its place''.

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* You wouldn't expect this trope in an FPS, but ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquerRenegade'' multiplayer can leave you with more money than you know what to do with, especially if you play as an Engineer. The character upgrade is fairly cheap and vehicles are limited in number. Plus you'll easily make more money repairing buildings and vehicles. Some servers try to alleviate this by allowing you to gamble for random prices.

* ''VideoGame/{{Borderlands}}'', full stop. You can find dollars ''everywhere'', and selling the guns you find but won't use is an extremely quick way to earn thousands upon thousands of $$$. However, the only ways to spend that money on are on ammo packs, of which the most expensive doesn't reach 80 bucks, and the [[SturgeonsLaw occasional]] good firearm, class/grenade mod, or shield. It gets so bad that money overflow[[labelnote:what?]]a glitch that screws the money counter after a certain amount is collected and ''completely'' empties the player's wallet upon death[[/labelnote]] is dangerously common, and a box that literally serves no other purpose than to remove '''eight millions''' off your funds (giving a YouSuck achievement in the process during the first time) becomes an important asset in later playthroughs to avoid it.
** ''VideoGame/{{Borderlands 2}}'' is slightly better since dying strips 10% of your total and ammo packs increase in price as you gain levels, and vending machines have an "Item of the Day" which is better than most of the regular stock, but only available for a limited amount of time.

* In the first ''{{Gothic}}'' game, money is literally useless; the player will occasionally find coins while looting bodies or chests for items, but they have zero value. This is because the game is set in a prison colony, where a magical metal ore used for making weaponry is the new currency. The ore itself then suffers from version #2: since traders have limited ore to swap for your VendorTrash, players frequently find themselves owning ''all the money in the world'' by the time of the final BossBattle...

* ''FireEmblem'' treads closer into Money For Nothing territory the easier each game generally is (higher difficulty settings notwithstanding). In the more difficult entries, they gradually let you acquire plenty of Gold to get you through to the end of the game, but not nearly enough to give you limitless resources, forcing you to prioritze what equipment to buy when. When this is not the case, however...
** ''[[FireEmblemTheSacredStones The Sacred Stones]]'' is not as stingy with gold as the other GBA games, though you can't quite exploit the [[LevelGrinding random skirmish battles]] for money at first either, since random gold drops start out giving the equivalent of pocket change. Upon beating the game and beginning the post-game, this changes and you have as much money as you want to grind for.
** ''[[FireEmblemTellius Path of Radiance]]'': The first 2/3rds of the game leave you increasingly less wanting for money until it's almost a non-issue, and then [[spoiler:post-Chapter 19, your army uncovers a shed of enemy supplies with ''120,000 gold'' just lying around! 50k of that is spent in-story to faciliate a WhamEpisode, but the remaining 70k is all yours to blow.]] After that, you're loaded for the rest of the game. The justification for this is to give you plenty of gold to spend on the new [[ItemCrafting weapon-forging system]], which is not necessary to complete the game, so you're welcome to ignore it and spend the balance of the game swimming in that money.
** ''[[FireEmblemAkaneia Shadow Dragon]]'' & ''[[FireEmblemAkaneia New Mystery of the Emblem]]'' are equally happy to leave you flush with cash for almost the duration. But, at the very end of both games, there's a comically huge incentive to stockpile as much gold as you can: [[spoiler:There are secret shops hidden in the penultimate chapters, each selling 3 of every permanent stat-boosting item available. On account of the timing - there's nothing else to do with that money after all - you're encouraged to go broke buying up all those stat boosts and use them to make quicker work of the final chapters.]]
** ''[[FireEmblemAwakening Awakening]]'' plays it straightest on Normal mode, where those random skirmishes drop gold in increments of 1000-2000 per drop, and the item that can spawn skirmishes at will only costs a mere 500. Said item is, sadly, jacked up to 3200 gold on Hard and Lunatic modes so you can't turn a profit as easily. Regardless, the game is almost as cash-happy as the above two entries, and if that's still not enough for you, there's the relatively easy [[DownloadableContent DLC map]] that contains mountains of gold and [[BribingYourWayToVictory can be played again and again to rake it in by the tens of thousands]]. Resources in this game are bottomless.

** ''[[FireEmblemAwakening Awakening]]'' plays it straightest on Normal mode, where those random skirmishes drop gold in increments of 1000-2000 per map, and the item that can spawn skirmishes at will only costs a mere 500. Said item is, sadly, jacked up to 3200 gold on Hard and Lunatic modes so you can't turn a profit as easily. Regardless, the game is almost as cash-happy as the above two entries, and if that's still not enough for you, there's the relatively easy [[DownloadableContent DLC map]] that contains mountains of gold and [[BribingYourWayToVictory can be played again and again to rake it in by the tens of thousands]]. Resources in this game are bottomless.

* The ''[[LegoAdaptationGame Lego]]'' ''StarWars'' games, particularly in 2, where one can build a fountain from gold Lego bricks that spews "studs" (their form of currency), which at that point, the player likely has little to nothing to spend them on. The Xbox 360 version of the game even gives you an achievement for maxing out the stud counter.
* ''Lego {{Batman}}'' and ''LegoIndianaJones'' are also bad "offenders". To wit: there are five stud multipliers that can be purchased, ranging from x2 to x10. They ''[[GameBreaker stack]]''.
** Of course they stack. [[IncrediblyLamePun They're Legos.]]

** In ''Lego {{Harry Potter}}'' you can buy an extra early on that turns all the 'Ghost Studs' that appear behind ghosts into BLUE studs. After that any other cash is useless.

* This has become increasingly more common across all new MMORPGs. The tendency to want to tightly control progression and prevent twinking, as well as a way to stop inevitable inflation (in universes with MoneySpiders) from ruining the gameplay, has led most MMO developers into introducing "badges" or other alternate, non-standard, merit currencies that are bound to a single character and can only be used to purchase items for the dungeon or event they are associated with.

** Partially averted in the ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaOracleGames Oracle of Ages/Seasons]]'' games though, where the Magic Potion costs 300 rupees, and you always want to be carrying one around. Although these can also sometimes be dropped by a semi-random encounter.

** In the second game, even if you don't import a character, you start with between 80 and 120 dinars (depending on whether or not you figure out the moneychanger's exchange rate scam). You will need about 200 dinars to finish the game for most characters, though thieves need far less, and you get 50 dinars for completing plot required missions every week (or so).

* The ''VideoGame/QuestForGlory'' series is pretty bad about this. The fifth game averts it, but all of the others give you more money than you can reasonably spend. The first game has the chain mail, which is fairly expensive, but a decently early quest reward happens to cover the cost exactly. The third has little worth buying, and the fourth lacks any real shops. However, the biggest case is the second game, Trial by Fire. There's a lot of items you need from the merchants, but the Kattas will ''give'' you whatever you need as soon as it's apparent that you need it to save the city (Kattas are smart that way). The entire thing is compounded by the ability to import characters and their boatloads of money from one game to the next.

* Bioware's ''MassEffect1'' is a prime example of this. Due to the large-but-limited nature of the player's inventory, by the time the limit is approached, it rapidly becomes apparent that the only thing to do with your excess (useless) items is to dump them for the AppliedPhlebotinum that was the aptly-named Omni-Gel...or sell it all. Since a level 1 suit of threadbare cotton armor turns into exactly as much Omni-Gel as a level 50 BFG, vendors often ended up buying all the player's trash. Which promptly leaves the player sitting near the end of the game with multiple millions of credits and the most expensive items rarely topping 300,000.

*** And [=BioWare=] eventually said "hell with it" when they got ready to release ''MassEffect2''; people needed [[OldSaveBonus high level saves to import]], and they promised more DLC, but time was running out. So for five bucks you can download Pinnacle Station and shoot at holograms while jerks snark at you -- and upon completing it, you can hit [[http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Pinnacle_Station:_Convoy a trade convoy]] where you can buy '''[[InfinityPlusOneSword Spectre X guns, Colossus armor, and Savant Bio-Amps and Omni-tools]].''' For about a fourth of list price.

* ''MassEffect2'' averts this when it comes to credits. The game has almost no corpse looting, and it carefully controls how much credits and other stuff you can gain on each mission. As a result, even if you track down and complete every side mission, it's impossible to buy everything in the stores on your first playthrough. However, it plays it straight when it comes to resources. You can mine them from any planet in the game, and if you're thorough about it, you quickly end up with far more resources than you could ever use. And you can't sell them, so they just sit around making big numbers on the resource counters.

* Spending money on items in {{Bayonetta}} is a waste. Since you come across plentiful components for item crafting in the pause menu, which costs NOTHING, and actually using said items will only detract from your post mission score. However, there are several things that your stockpiled money can be used for, like a certain cheat that lets you unlock particular weapons that otherwise can only be gained by beating the game on certain difficulty levels, and in one case, by beating an INSANELY difficult bonus boss.

*** The ''Gun Runners Arsenal'' DLC subverts this trope by adding a large number of unique weapons that can only be bought from merchants (previously, unique weapons were found while exploring. The lone exception to this rule could be stolen by picking a locked door while the shopkeeper was away). Many of these weapons are truly unique, rather than boosted versions of normal weapons (for example, Sleepytime is the only 10mm submachine gun that will accept a silencer, Two-Step Goodbye is a Ballistic Fist with a rocket launcher instead of a shotgun on it, and the Bozar is the only Light Machine Gun with magnifying optics), and all of them are ''expensive,'' typically costing upwards of 20,000 caps (for comparison, that's five times what the implants that give you a permanent stat increase cost).

** Late in the game, the player can buy some [=LAMs=] to help sink a ship (not [[ShipSinking that kind]]), which costs at minimum 2,400 credits and at most 3,500 credits. However, plenty of [=LAMs=] and TNT crates can be found lying around in the naval base for the player to use for free. Then again, no one after the gas station has anything to sell, even though there are still opportunities to pick up credits.

* ''[[{{Stalker}} S.T.A.L.K.E.R.]]'' has similar issues -- with every single humanoid enemy dropping firearms and ammunition, as well as most dropping food, medicine, and bandages, there weren't many reasons to visit shops other than to upgrade or replace armor. The VendorTrash and high mission rewards didn't help things, nor did the grand total of three traders with the slightest potential for anything useful.

* The same is true in the [[LordOfTheRings Middle Earth Quest]] gamebooks. In ''A Spy in Isengard'', for example, it is possible to find 20 Numenorean gold pieces, which in theory are very valuable. Good luck ever finding a place to spend them. The simple fact is there will be very few occasions in any of the books to go shopping, and even when you do there will be very little available that is worth buying.