My pick is Psyonix, the team behind the one and only Rocket League.
And why they’re my pick is because they’ve been prioritizing elitist gamers over generally everyone of all skill levels. This is evident when you are penalized for leaving matches in Casual Mode that escalates from 5 minutes to even hours. Basically limiting and restricting your playtime on a game people had once paid for.
And I say once paid for because this game once had a price tag along with DLCs. Sometime a few years ago, Psyonix sold itself to Epic Games and flipped Rocket League to Free-to-Play or Freemium. They delisted the game from Steam and unless you had been accumulating anything before the delisting, you are SOL.
In the Epic Games version of Rocket League, you have to build back up everything that was once readily available when it was on Steam. Having to pick up common body parts, having to pick up decals, flags, wheels .etc
All of these are just one continual dump after another from Psyonix on the fans that truly are there to have a fun time and not be a foaming drooling tryhard of an elitist player.
I’ll say Ubisoft. I don’t think I need to explain why.
I would argue Ubisoft doesn’t love or feel anything. It was a slow regress, but at some point it has lost enough of it’s humanity to just become a dead object. A machine run by a faulty algorithm bringing it’s rapidly approaching destruction.
Nintendo. They hate the smash fighting scene.
In 2007, my big companies that i adored were: Bethesda, Bungie, Bioware and Rockstar. They’ve all gone the way of the dodo as far as I’m concerned nowadays.
Nintendo. Nintendo, and it’s not even close.
deleted by creator
EA, Ubisoft and Take Two.
Willing to skip any game from those three.
God just watching the Madden documentary “it’s in the game” it’s tragic how competition from others made them innovate. Now without any outside forces to push them, they release the same (sometimes downgraded and worse) game with the “fuck you it’s Madden, you’ll buy it anyway, paypig” stigma.
Nintendo.
Not just crushing fan games, but also issues with the Smash bros community, pricing and availability, eshops shutting down (+needing to buy those games again on new consoles or it’s not even available at start), stick drift, fan content policy, also Youtube strikes/claims (both newer for specific reasons and an entire era for let’s plays in general). 20 years of content removed from Gmod.
And no this isn’t about Japanese law, they choose to be this way.
For actual specifics (and more issues) 2 videos: UKD_wnB9AMU and xgKY9hmbfgo
Nintendo has increasingly become a problem over there last decade. From taking down tournaments, going after YouTubers, the predatory partner program that they ran for a bit, them suing everybody in sight. Them being anti-emulation but then being found to use emulation that was created by a third party and profiting off of it.
I’ve already decided I’m not buying the next console. I’m done with that company. I look forward, genuinely, to innate file for bankruptcy. To me they’re a lot like Bizzard. Both of these companies are not the same company they were 20 years ago.
Big N could make losses for decades to come and still have lots of cash to spend but it won’t come to that because they make stupid amounts of cash with merchandising alone. So no, you and I likely won’t live to see their bankruptcy and I honestly couldn’t care less anyway. I just won’t buy their stuff and that’s that. They also have not changed. They’ve been this way since the Donkey Kong vs. King Kong lawsuit and a long history of harassing fans going back 20 years and more.
I’ve repeatedly heard that they could operate at a loss for decades and be fine… But I’ve never actually seen real numbers to back that up.
Nintendo has increasingly become a problem over the last decade
Of the other related videos, one by Knowledge Husk (7FWyhlS3kvc) points to the CEOs being an issue and that they just had one (1) good CEO: Satoru Iwata (particularly because he was a computer scientist who was pro-consumer).
Now I doubt Nintendo was fully non-evil in 2002-2015 (considering Nintendo actions with 2010s-era Youtube) but I’m sure it was probably the better side of Nintendo.
If it’s as easy to hack as the Switch, I’ll buy it. But I’ll buy it used.
Their war on emulation is the reason I’ll never buy Nintendo again.
Same.
TBF, the Smash Bros community brought their all-but-destruction on themselves. The rest is pretty valid, though.
If we’re going to destroy entire competitive scenes over a handful of bad actors, there would be no competitive games ever.
Nintendo has been against them before any real self destruction had started from the community though. In 2013 the melee community raised $95k for breast cancer research, which led to melee being picked up for evo 2013. Nintendo then tried to shut down the live stream of the tournament, and then shutdown the whole melee event for reasons known only to Nintendo.
Don’t forget basically keeping the secondhand market prices for Pokemon games high by never rereleasing old games, or making old games available to play on new consoles.
Also backups. I don’t know if anything has changed in the last few years but when i had a Switch I tried to back up my save files to an external drive. As far as I can remember it wasn’t possible ootb, only the option to transfer to a new Switch. Which, pun intended, made me switch to a Steam Deck and I couldn’t be happier (except for 1st party Nintendo titles of course)
The Deck can play first party Nintendo titles ;3
The Deck can play first party Nintendo titles ;3 *
- For newer titles framerates will be significantly worse and bugs will be numerous
Gearbox Games, Robert Space Industries and Ubisoft are the big ones that come to mind.
Both indirectly (via just not respecting their customers in their products at all) and even directly (look at Dandy Pitchforks constantly whining about the mean mean players).
Gearbox allowed Homeworld 3 to ship. Fuck Randy.
HiRez.
EA. Remember ‘A sense of pride and accomplishment?’ as their justification for star wars battlefront ii remake with Darth Vader be absurdly expensive.
“Nobody wants a Pink Vader…”
In 1983 or so I bought a Japanese themed RPG for the Apple IIe published by EA.
It didn’t like the disk drive we had, so the copy protection would reboot over and over.
There were only two models of disk drive for the Apple IIe.
EA has always been this way.
Nintendo, just look at how much they hate it when we try to emulate games that they refuse to sell anymore.
Or when someone makes one of their games but better
A better question would be which one doesn’t, the list of those who don’t would be a lot shorter than those who do in some way, shape or form. All three major console companies, any second party devs associated with them, and most major third party console or PC devs and publishers pull some sort of anti-consumer BS or another. The wall of shame includes the likes of EA, Ubisoft, Capcom, Square-Enix, Activision Blizzard, and many more. One of the huge selling points of BG3 was that it was a major release that didn’t have anything in it designed to screw fans over, and it was (deservedly) greatly praised and rewarded by the fans for it, to the point that other jealous devs/publishers freaked out about the future of their business if more of them followed suit. That should tell you all you need to know.
My top 3: EA, Ubisoft, Nintendo
Blizzard. I’ve been recently thinking about how much of a “comfort food” the game is for me, and how no other game could ever get me the same feeling as returing back to a game I’ve spent literally months player over the last 15 years. It’s my escapism, where I don’t have to stress about anything and know so much about the game, that I don’t have to learn anything new or unknown, which makes it even more comfortable. It’s also a game where I have a lot of friends, and since they are in the similar boat, we usually just meet up for an expansion - but investing our whole group into another game usually just fails.
The problem is, that Blizzard knows this and has started to exploit it. Milking players of as much money as they can, while abandoning their “Players First” motto and absolutely shitting over the playerbase by gutting most of the development teams that had some passion left, hiring management who didn’t care about the game in the slightest and only was there to increase revenue and reduce costs as much as possible.
It’s more and more apparent, the game is in the worst and buggiest state as far as I remember, lot of content was cut, there’s literally no customer support - people can be stuck for weeks with their character somewhere, while only response they get is an AI generated “FUCK YOU”, and their only hope being that their post will blow up on reddit and someone will actually look at their case.
The new book about Blizzard is so depressing read, and makes me extremely angry. Fuck all those people who ruined the company, even though one of the founding owners was extremely against it and fought for years to keep at least some semblance of original vision. And he lost.
I hate that I always return to the game when I’m down and just need a serious dose of escapism from real life, that only this game can provide. I’m slowly trying to invest myself into other MMOs, and get rid of this toxic, gaslighting ex WoW has been for me. But what I hate the most is how obvious their change of priorities is in their recent games.
I wish nothing but the worst for people who ruined Blizzard. We could’ve had second Larian, if it was Morhaime instead of Kodick and his greed who won.
Thankfully, we have FFXIV and Path of Exile, that still respect players, and Blizz games can go fuck themselves. I hope I’ll manage to finally transition from WoW for good this time.
There’s never been a better time to get into Old School RuneScape
I started FFXIV trial few weeks ago, and so far I was having a blast. The major issue is that I probably won’t manage to convince my friends and partner to also switch, since they are invested in WoW and are having fun. But the plan is to find a nice FC and get some regular events in, and we’ll see how it goes.
On the other hand, I tried that with GW2 a few years ago, had a blast, found someone random to play with, but eventually I just forgot about the game… Which is something that never happens with WoW 😠
Try ascension, it’s an old school wow-like with no classes giving it a familiar but fresh feeling, might help to unstick some from wow making moving easier
Thanks for this, it actually made me realize that there is another MMO I spent more of my childhood with - Stat Wars Galaxies, and more importantly, that I can still play it on private servers. Which also extends to WoW, playing on a private server might acually be a good compromise, when I get the urge again.
But so far, I’m falling for FFXIV. Hopefully Square Enix isn’t as bad as Blizz. I remember hearing some NFT writings on the wall, but so far it doesn’t sound too bad.
It’s great I’m half way through MSQ.
be aware that there IS some menial fetch quest shit in the beginning that hasn’t aged the best
Tried ESO, GW2 and XIV. I went back to XIV… especially with mods
I just got through whole of ARR and started HW, so I should be past that point. Haven’t really noticed it too much, but the difference in pacing is kind of apparent in the hindsight. The story is interesting enough and the game never ceases to amaze me with variety of side activities or QoL things that I don’t mind a slower pace and am greatful for the game as is. Especially comparing it to WoW, its such a breath of fresh air. So far it feels like the game SWTOR wished to be, and it’s great.
I also think that they heavily cut through the amount of slog required for ARR, judging by the list of removed mandatory MSQ quests on wiki.
Nintendo.
