War For Fun And Profit / Video Games

War for Fun and Profit in Video Games.

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• In 2027, Evgeny participates in this in the Omar ending if you helped expand his territory.
• Ace Combat:
  • In Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception, the Big Bad dictator who emerges after a civil war in his country invades a peaceful neighboring country, for allegedly working to prolong the civil war (in fact, the neighbor had been supplying humanitarian aid). It's eventually revealed that the whole point was to demonstrate the villain's military might, thereby allowing for lucrative arms trading, particularly advertising his greatest fighter aircraft.
  • Ace Combat: Joint Assault manages to one-up this spectacularly. Although at first you are fighting a terrorist group "Vallahia" from remnants of a nameless Central European country, the attacks are backed by the CEO of an insurance company. The reasoning goes that with terrorism on the rise, terrorism insurance is selling for a massive profit, and the company benefits off of it. However, the shrewdest part is that said company will then sell the insurance business to other companies for an even greater price, and then stage a last attack so overwhelming no company can ever hope to follow through on the insurance. Then the price falls, and it's ripe for the company to take again. Rinse and repeat.
• Alpha Protocol:
  • The fundamental plot of the game is an attempt by an American-based weapons corporation to boost their profits by causing a new Cold War between China and the US. Unfortunately, their calculations are off by a bit - the cold war they're attempting to start will actually become a hot war if they aren't stopped, so its up to Mike Thorton to put an end to the plot before the nukes start flying.
  • The player can also uncover some additional examples of this as the game progresses. For example, Mike can dig up evidence that a semi-anonymous US Senator wants to arrange for a war in Central Asia or the Middle East (he doesn't terribly care where) so he can sell off a few thousand artillery pieces manufactured by a company that he owns but are being left unused. There's also evidence of war profiteering, where the aforementioned arms company wants to sell weapons to both China and Taiwan, but give them weapons with different ammunition specifications, so they have to keep buying separate weapons' packages.
• This trope is the basis for the Excuse Plot of the Saturn shooter AMOK. Two warring countries have finally made peace after 47 years of war, but the weapon manufacturer of both sides is pissed and so hires a mercenary to reignite the hostilities.
• One of the few heroic examples, Apex Legends has Rampart, a gun modifying specialist who sold Ace Custom guns and gun mods that made her a popular choice for weapons in the Outlands; she doesn't hold a grudge if she gets taken out by her own weapons as it is proof that she is that good at her job. While somewhat sarcastic and a tried-and-true Brit, she has a hardworking attitude that makes up for her personality. Unfortunately, it was her arrogance that led to her shop getting burned down.
• The whole plan of the Big Bad of Baldur's Gate revolves around causing a huge war between two rival merchant governments as a way of proving himself worthy of inheriting his dead father's former position as the God of Murder. Once the plan is found out, it initially looks like he has plenty of backing for this... but it soon becomes apparent that actual war is a step too far for most of the Iron Throne. Not for moral reasons, they just aren't privy to the 'become the new God of Murder' plot or would see the profit in it if they were, and that leaves war disruptive enough to cut down profits.
• The two main Mad Scientists of BioShock, Tenenbaum and Suchong, survived World War II by collaborating with the Axis Powers: Tenenbaum rubbed elbows with Nazi scientists who admired her cunning, and thus escaped the gas chambers. Suchong... well:
  Suchong: War a terrible thing. Japanese kill every man in my city, except for Suchong. Suchong have opium. Very good opium. This war, terrible thing, too, but not for Suchong...
• Call of Duty:
  • In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, General Shepherd, pissed off that he lost 30,000 men in Al-Asad's nuclear explosion, played Makarov like a fiddle to trigger a Russian invasion of America so that he can turn the USA into the most powerful country in the world through military might and pose himself as a legendary war hero.
    • It's worth noting that while Shepherd is unquestionably the Big Bad and his war-mongering is specific to accomplishing something, he's not selfish, he's just downright unhinged. There's some noble intent in his goal of waking America up from taking everything for granted and inspiring more people than ever to willingly enlist and earn their luxuries, all without dealing with the downsides of compulsory service like unwilling and apathetic soldiers. He believes his ends justify the means, and doesn't see what's wrong with anything he's done, unlike the player-characters and most actual players.
    • Vladimir Makarov also wants to start war for fun and profit, though the "fun" in this case is "dead Americans/British/miscellaneous Europeans" and the "profit" is his version of Russia ruling all of Europe like it "should have" after World War II.
  • In Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, the Atlas company begins the game as Hired Guns for the world powers, then begins supplanting conventional militaries after a series of terrorist attacks send world governments into disarray. It is later revealed that Atlas CEO Jonathon Irons orchestrated the terrorist attacks to allow his company to become a N.G.O. Superpower.
• The Rikti War in City of Heroes was orchestrated by Nemesis. His original motive is never pinned down, but a Nemesis army defector says he believes Nemesis had meant to swoop in and save the day once the war began and be hailed as a hero, but he badly underestimated the Rikti. After Nemesis' role was revealed, leaving no chance of him emerging the hero, he revealed a Plan B: Take over the Rikti mental network and gain a billions-strong army.
• Civilization:
  • Conquering all other nations is one of the series' recurrent multiple win conditions, but some civs get rewards just for fighting without even taking any territory. Examples include the Aztecs in V and the Spartans in VI who gain Culture for killing enemy units, the Byzantines in VI whose religion spreads faster when defeating units of a different faith and the Honour policy tree in V that grants Gold. There are also some unique units in V that grant points toward your next Golden Age from combat victories — so sorry about all those dead soldiers, but we really wanted to throw a party.
  • Under Civ VI's Casus Belli mechanic, warmongering penalties are reduced somewhat if you admit you're declaring war for your own enrichment: there's the War of Territorial Expansion ("Sorry, you're in our way"), the Colonial War ("We're higher on the Tech Tree and you look juicy"), and the Golden Age War ("Life has never been better... To arms!").
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert Series:
  • In Command & Conquer: Red Alert, with Hitler erased from time (and thus no World War II), a rather bored Josef Stalin woke up one day and realized that starting a war to rule all Europe is something he'd like to do. In the end, it turns out that he was manipulated by the Brotherhood of Nod, many members of which are secretly on his staff.
  • After the war in the Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 Expansion Pack Uprising, Future Tech has taken the opportunity in acquiring the technology of the three war weary factions when no one's looking.

• Inverted with the Roving Clans in Endless Legend, who are incapable of declaring war because it's bad for business; can't have armies roving around plundering trading routes and scaring away the customers! It's probably a good thing too, because they're bad at combat. Luckily, they can hire mercenaries — and bribe them with mouth-watering delicacies and extra gold to make them more motivated in combat — who can engage in False Flag Operations.
• EVE Online:
  • The whole point of Null Sec. If your corp isn't making a profit on a war, someone certainly is.
  • The ongoing Red Vs. Blue fight also qualifies.
  • Pretty much anytime something blows up, it has to be replaced by buying it from another player. If you're lucky, your corp is footing the bill.
• Final Fantasy XI: While he didn't actually start the Crystal War, the goblin Boodlix certainly makes a profit from selling goods to both sides of it. Although Boodlix is a freelancer who fights with the Beastmen Confederate, the Scholar Maruna-Kurina believes that Boodlix might be persuaded to fight for the Allies if it would help make the war (and thus his profits) last a little longer.
• Fire Emblem: Awakening: In the game's first act, this is Gangrel's entire plan in a nutshell: to start a war with Ylisse purely For the Evulz. If recruited later on, long after his apparent death and ousting from the throne, Gangrel will actually admit he started out wanting to forcibly unite Ylisse and Regna Ferox under Plegia so he could prepare for Walhart's eventual conquest from across the sea, but he quickly found it was far more fun to settle the ancient score between Plegia and Ylisse with war crimes.
• Freelancer starts with the colonies in the brink of war. It later turns out that the Nomads are secretly parasitizing the top politicians in Sirius and using their power to declare all-out war, in order to soften the human defenses and let the Nomads mop the sector with their blood, and the Order is actually here to defend the Sirius sector against the Nomads.
• Genshin Impact: The Fatui influenced the beginning of the Vision Hunt Degree and the beginning of the war between the Shogun's force's and the Resistance, all to profit from it in addition to getting Inazuma's gnosis.
• The Gunrunning and Smuggler's Run patches for Grand Theft Auto Online allow the player to oversee and participate in the smuggling of weapons and other contraband.
• In Horizon Zero Dawn, Faro Automated Systems, the company that developed all the machines that would build the machines on the post-apocalyptic Earth, was deeply into this. One of their recoverable corporate memos even mentions a sales exec arranging for two hostile enemies to "accidentally" meet at the same time for a sales pitch, and the resulting physical violence ended with both sides increasing their bids for weapons by nearly forty percent because of how pissed off they were at each other. In the end, Faro's greed led to developing robotic weapons that were self-directing, self-sustaining, and unhackable, and when those robots glitched out and stopped following orders, Ted Faro's perfect money-making war machines completely destroyed humanity.
• In Iron Storm, the Forever War has turned into this, with the arms industries and armies being an important part of the stock exchange and manipulating the USWE and The Empire to prolong the war in the name of profit.
• In Ketsui, EVAC Corporation is a MegaCorp that, in the midst of a World War III, sells weapons to all sides of the conflict to keep its profits going. They maintain a powerful standing army too and even intervene in any attempts at peace between nations, just to create an excuse to continue manufacturing and selling weapons.
• The opening gambit of Hades from Kid Icarus: Uprising is to engineer a war between the nations of the world over a MacGuffin he completely made up. In his case, the reason is that he's the ruler of the underworld, and he's learned how to turn all the souls that reach his realm into a valuable resource. Inefficiently. That, and they're apparently delicious.
• Megadimension Neptunia VII:
  • Averted by Affimojas of the "secret organization" AffimaX. When asked by the Big Bad if he would like to see this trope put in action, Affimojas scoffs at the use of war in terms of armed conflict, seeing it as bad for business. He would much rather fight wars in the fields of espionage and knowledge-brokering in order to control and disperse (true or fake) information to make his profits and it helps that deep down he's not actually the sort of guy who wants blood on his hands. Indeed, AffimaX unknown to most of the world actually controls the world's largest information-sharing site and when the Big Bad initiates a Cosmic Retcon they use it to profit from the worldwide chaos and people's need for information.
  • Played straight by The Order, a group of mercenaries based in Lastation who sold themselves and weapons for war before Noire crushed them in the past. Due to Noire's disposal from her position as leader thanks to the aforementioned Cosmic Retcon, the remnants of the Order reunited and took over Lastation with plans to start again by waging war on the other nations. They're based off several such groups that appear in Metal Gear, particularly in their usage of Child Soldiers (which the Gold Third member K-Sha was formerly a part of) and various weapons like the M-Gear. Part of Noire's mission during her personal chapter is to stop them.
• Metal Gear:
  • Big Boss wanted to plunge the world into "eternal warfare" in order to give soldiers a place in the world. He starts off as a fairly standard Bond-esque baddie, but as Snake Eater rolls in, it becomes apparent that his wild war fantasies are fed by the philosophy of The Boss that the world needs an "absolute timeless enemy". A couple of well-placed prophecies and his increasingly deteriorating sanity help, too. The concept of a "world of eternal warfare" — named "Outer Heaven" — is a recurring theme throughout the series (MGS4 has Liquid Ocelot intentionally name the game's final location, a warship, based on this).
  • Guns of the Patriots, however, takes the trope to the other end of the spectrum. It ultimately became clear that Big Boss initially didn't want an eternal World War III, and simply founded Outer Heaven to give people, especially soldiers, a place where they would be free from the La-li-lu-le-lo. It wasn't until Zanzibarland that he gave up all hope of soldiers being reintegrated into society. Years later, his ideals were further perverted by his successors, The Patriots, instigating countless conflicts and pouring the world's resources into soldiers and weapons; war ends up replacing oil as a commodity — a self-destructive commodity. Investing in war doesn't create new resources, so the world is falling ever deeper into a depression where "oil and gasoline are as precious as diamonds", but attempting to stop war would render those investments worthless, triggering a total global economic collapse. It's pretty much the lesson Hideo Kojima is trying to convey: war isn't about right and wrong, it just is.
    • To make things worse, it turns out that the MGS4-era Patriots are nothing more than rogue supercomputer-A.I., repeatedly performing long-obsolete orders and driven insane from virus attacks, and use their powers of manipulation to get the whole world to follow their insanity. They almost succeeded at brainwashing the entire world with nanomachines to ensure they could create a literally total global war.
  • Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance shows that even after the Patriots were finally defeated, the world is still stuck in this rut. The Big Bad gloats that the Patriots are no longer necessary to maintain the "war economy", people can do it just fine on their own. However, unlike in MGS4, in which the world at large seemed okay with the war economy, almost nobody (including the aforementioned Big Bad) supports it here apart from Sundowner.
    Sundowner: All we're saying is... GIVE WAR A CHANCE!
  • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is set in 1980s Afghanistan and Africa, where national armies and proxy factions slaughter each other and the local populations for the two superpowers. It's clear that the war has destroyed dozens of villages and allowed tyrants to rule unimpeded, but none of the factions will de-escalate because it would mean losing everything. Skull Face's master plan is to fracture the Cold War superpowers into impotent nation-states, by permanently disrupting all global communications with language-triggered parasitic killers and supplying affordable ICBM-equipped Mini-Mecha Metal Gears to everyone. The end result of this would have been a world locked in a total Enforced Cold War; every nation in the world would be the same, and capable of empathizing with each other's plights, but all nation-states would also be ruled by whoever (allegedly) owns the nukes, turning the entire planet into a patchwork of third-world cult-ruled dictatorships, all answering to Skull Face alone. No place on the face of the Earth would be free from the warlords and their sexual abuse, slavery, and genocide. And even worse, if any nation-state tried to form allegiances with their neighbors, they would be instantly nuked into oblivion as Skull Face remotely sabotaged their nukes, and their historical intents would be misunderstood by all surviving countries due to lack of a common language.
  • The Omniscient Council of Vagueness in Metal Gear Ac!d is a company, BEAGLE, that exists to orchestrate minor but bloody civil wars, sell huge amounts of weapons to both sides, and profit.
• Might and Magic:
  • VII features another conflict between the mostly human kingdom of Erathia and the mostly elven kingdom of Tularea/AvLee over the Contested Lands. The evil path has an agent of the necromancers' kingdom of Deyja help escalate the conflict into a full-scale war, weakening Deyja's rivals, producing a rich bounty of 'resources' to exploit and ensuring that reconciliation between Erathia and Tularea is unlikely for the forseeable future.
  • VIII has Charles Quixote's dragon-hunting expedition, which makes some light pretensions at the usual dragonslayer reasons but quickly shows itself to be primarily interested in the commercial opportunities, both from harvesting dragon corpses and enslaving and 'training' young dragon. As to it being a war, dragons in the setting are fully sapient, and Quixote's expedition is in Garrote Gorge — seat of the largest known dragon settlement, complete with a king.
• In Mount & Blade, if you are a lord and talk to another noble of your faction who likes you and possesses evil characteristics, he may propose starting a war with a neighboring kingdom by raiding some caravans for this trope if you ask him for a task. Justified in that Calradian warfare offers many chances and few risks for nobles. The worst that's going to happen to them is being taken prisoner for a while until they can escape or are ransomed. On the other hand, they can improve their standing with the king and other nobles by being successful in battle, possibly obtaining new fiefs or even being promoted to Marshall, and raiding enemy villages and caravans happens to be very lucrative.
• Nintendo Wars:
  • In Advance Wars, Big Bad Sturm goes for the gold with this trope, creating clones of Orange Star officers to start a four-way war, with the intent to swoop in afterwards with his own army and take over after everyone's resources were drained.
  • Ditto Batallion Wars Wii, where the Anglo Isles ("England") attacks the Solar Empire ("Japan") because the Solar Empire was rumored to be making a superweapon... and this is less than 30 years after the same thing happened between the Western Frontier and the Tundran Territories (take a guess). In both cases, the whole thing was orchestrated by the leader of Xylvania (the closest Nintendo Wars has ever gotten to Those Wacky Nazis).
  • Days of Ruin has this with Caulder/Stolos and his company Intelligent Defense Systems, which supplies small arms and innovative weapons to both Rubinelle and Lazuria during their conflict. On the personal side, Caulder just likes studying the effects of war and death on humans.
    • The Beast, meanwhile, is the leader of a group of raiders who prey on the few surviving pockets of civilization... but even if they're set for a while, he'll still attack the villages because he just likes blood.
• Overwatch: Talon is a Nebulous Evil Organisation that promotes insurgency and warfare "to make humanity stronger through conflict". Profit is made from taking advantage of these conflicts, but a few high-ranking leaders (Doomfist) buy into the tagline.
• The Resident Evil franchise has this as a recurring theme, as first the Umbrella Corporation, then their disbanded investors, then more recently the mysterious group "the Connections" develop biological weapons to sell for warfare. Often, mercenaries and the like have worked with them, sometimes with their own agendas that would allow them to profit from their military actions, perpetuating this trope.
• In RuneScape, most of the quest 'Royal Trouble' revolves around this. A group of kids unable to pass tests that would make them full adults of their tribe go to two warring islands and decide to start a war, stop it, and then be seen as heroes.
• While this more or less applies to any time in Sid Meier's Pirates!, the period 1640-1659 is called just this — "War for Profit".
• This is the very premise for the game The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces, where you work for a company called Rostock against their rival Lautern. As the opening narration summarizes it, "There are those who need war, and those who supply it", casting war as just another normal business activity.
• This is essentially the motivation of the Prince of Highland, Luca Blight in Suikoden II. He starts a massive war between the newly allied nations of Highland and Jowston by orchestrating a False Flag Operation, in which he betrays and butchers a band of his own nation's child unit the night they are to return to their homes and blames it on Jowston. He uses this as his justification to invade Jowston and level it to the ground, hoping to torture and murder every last one of its citizens (usually by his own hand). Unlike most examples here, his motives aren't profit or terrorism... he just enjoys killing.
• Super Robot Wars:
  • In Super Robot Wars Original Generations, the Shadow Mirrors were dedicated to creating endless conflict. Why? Their own dimension's Federation had become corrupt after the Inspectors had been driven off. They believed that with endless conflict that there would not be any corrupt politicians, and that technology would increase rapidly. The leader points out that since the Divine Crusaders war the strength of Earth has increased rapidly.
  • Likewise, from the same game, Mitsuko Isurugi, head of Isurugi Industries, who wanted the conflicts to go on as long as possible so that her company could continue making money by selling their weapons to every side. The only reason why she hadn't been arrested is because her company is the only one still capable of supplying the Federation with mechs and if they had to do some backalley deals to stay ahead of the game, so be it
  • Except Einst, maybe because they hasn't any kind of economical activities.
  • The Ruina from Super Robot Wars Destiny live on this, mostly to gain negative energy for Perfectio and use worlds as fields to cultivate negative energies.
• This is heavily hinted to be the motivation of the Administrator from Team Fortress 2. As the acting CEO of two feuding megacorps, each of which controls one half of the world, and as CEO of her own Weapon Supply Company, the Administrator has everything to gain from keeping the conflict going.
• In Utawarerumono, court adviser and Humongous Mecha pilot Hien encourages Kuuya to unite the world under the Kunnekamun for the sake of peace. Fellow adviser and pilot Hauenkua also wants to invade the other countries as Hien does, but only so he could kill people.

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