Evil Bad Guy Game Developers

[JakeM]

As in People who dont care at all about games, just want money or something to stroke their egos with, and thus put out bad products. Can you name any?

The ones I can think of are Tomm Hulett for ruining the Silent Hill series. EA in general seems like an evil empire corporation of course to many people, me included. LJN made a ton of bad games, were the same person(s) in charge of all of them, who were they?

Anyone you really hate or just dont like?

[Parodius Duh!]

EA is the definition of scum in the videogame industry. I pray they go bankrupt someday soon.

LJN were just quick to cash in on any movie license they could get their hands on, they knew the games were crap but people would buy them regardless due to being a fan of the film the title is based on.


Microsoft is also starting to go towards the darkside. We will see how they fair during the next wave of consoles.....

[needler420]

EA is the definition of scum in the videogame industry. I pray they go bankrupt someday soon.

LJN were just quick to cash in on any movie license they could get their hands on, they knew the games were crap but people would buy them regardless due to being a fan of the film the title is based on.


Microsoft is also starting to go towards the darkside. We will see how they fair during the next wave of consoles.....

Microsoft has been greedy long before getting into the console industry. They always pay for exclusive DLC and content because they got deep pockets.

This next generation is going to hurt them big time.

EA is another. Consumerist readers poll has them as the worst company in the USA two years in a row. They are rated worse then bank of America. Which BOA got it's place from the real estate crash and all the predatory lending they did. Along with all the other BS. I know I lost hundreds of dollars in little BS fees maybe even scams when I used to bank with them.

EA
Microsoft
Activision

are pure greedy companies with very poor business ethics. It's also catching up with them. Personally I can careless about these three companies. The only good thing I see from their existence is competition for others.

[kupomogli]

EA gets a lot of unwarranted hate. They've came out with more good new IPs than most developers this generation. Similar to Sony, they also give their developers and contracted third party developers a large budget and freedom to do whatever with that budget.

Capcom is one of those borderline companies. With games like Resident Evil 6, even though it sucks, they did put a lot of money into making it a good game. Resident Evil Operation Raccoon City is another one that just happened to suck. There are good games like DMC DmC, Dragon's Dogma, Street Fighter 4, etc. With the games that do well though, games like Street Fighter 4 and Resident Evil 5, they have disc locked content or Super and Arcade rereleases, etc.

I see bad publishers/developers as those who purposefully release shit quality titles to their consumers. Publishers like Activision, Ubisoft, and DeepSilver.

Activision and Ubisoft do push out some actual well developed titles, even if a lot of them are milking the same franchises and those franchises may or may not suck based on player opinion. But more than that, there are games like Battleship or the Walking Dead that are released by Activision, or Spartacus Legends and the one hundred Imagine titles released by Ubisoft, although I will atleast say that Spartacus Legends being free to play is a plus for them.

DeepSilver, other than Metro which was pretty much finished prior to them acquiring it as well as the upcoming Saints Row 4, has published two games which are debatably good. Dead Island and Dead Island Riptide. Debatably because it depends on the system you're playing it on. If you're playing it on PC and 360 it's fine, but if you're a PS3 owner, you'll get in my opinion the shittiest port to hit consoles. Forget Bayonetta and Ghostbusters. Dead Island constantly drops frames and over the course of an hour you will hit 0fps several times. It's around 10-20 hour game as well. Constant screen tearing, etc. Riptide is a new game, and they just ported the engine over, fixing none of the problems. I watched a Youtube video and within the first minute of that video it hit 0fps once.

DeepSilver has a long track record of great games that they've published though. Games such as Risen, Risen 2, Pet Vet: Down Under, Let's Play random garbage, workout games on the Wii, etc.

[Parodius Duh!]

EA gets a lot of unwarranted hate. They've came out with more good new IPs than most developers this generation. Similar to Sony, they also give their developers and contracted third party developers a large budget and freedom to do whatever with that budget.

EA is notorious for purchasing and then destroying great independent publishers and game creators. They also like to purchase popular franchises and ruin them. Im not sure about the new generation cause I dont go beyond anything newer than ps2, but thats when EA really started to scour the industry for smaller companies they could buy out and put six feet under. Larry Probst and Peter Moore are shithead businessmen that have no place in the gaming industry. Their aggressive tactics are better suit for a company like Exxon.

[wiggyx]

It's so laughable that EA, a company which makes video games, so often gets voted "worst company" in moronic consumer polls.

They make video games for goodness sake. Shows how well people's heads are screwed on when there are companies actually doing terrible things besides, you know, charging for content or whatever else people think makes them bad/evil/terrible/etc.

[Graham Mitchell]

Nobody's mentioned Zynga yet?

[kupomogli]

EA is notorious for purchasing and then destroying great independent publishers and game creators.

What publisher isn't? A lot of developers have been purchased by Sony and are no longer in business. Same with Microsoft, Activision, Capcom, Squaresoft, Ubisoft, etc.

Infact, EA purchased a lot of these "great independent developers" when they were going bankrupt, saving them from immediately going under and giving them more time to turn their studio around and make a profit under a large company that can actually afford a reasonable budget.

It's not EA's fault anyways. If you want to blame someone, blame the developers themselves. They're the ones who sold their studio and properties to EA. Buying and selling works two ways. EA doesn't just say, okay, we're going to give you this amount and you're going to work for us. It doesn't work that way. These developers could have said no, even the ones going bankrupt could have declined.

If EA was such a bad publisher, you wouldn't have multiple third party developers signing contracts with them to get their games published. 38 Studios, Klei Entertainment, Insomniac Games, and Respawn Entertainment are only a few of the developers who have had publishing contracts with EA. Here you can read an interview with one of Klei Entertainment's developers on how it was to work with EA Partners on their games getting published.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/05/05/interview-kleis-anderson-talks-upside-of-eas-indies/

[SuperSonic]

EA is notorious for purchasing and then destroying great independent publishers and game creators. They also like to purchase popular franchises and ruin them. Im not sure about the new generation cause I dont go beyond anything newer than ps2, but thats when EA really started to scour the industry for smaller companies they could buy out and put six feet under. Larry Probst and Peter Moore are shithead businessmen that have no place in the gaming industry. Their aggressive tactics are better suit for a company like Exxon.

WestWood, Dice, Maxis

[buzz_n64]

Nobody's mentioned Zynga yet?

They're not worthy of acknowledgement.

[needler420]

Nobody's mentioned Zynga yet?

Hardcore gamers don't consider mobile gaming mainstream. Forever shunned.

I know I own a android tablet for almost three months and I won't play any android based game no matter if it's free nor how good you tell me it is.

I hope all those mobile gaming companies go out of business.

Tired of seeing people play pac-man on their phones and then telling people they are a hardcore gamer. You're as casual as casual gets.

[Bojay1997]

Hardcore gamers don't consider mobile gaming mainstream. Forever shunned.

I know I own a android tablet for almost three months and I won't play any android based game no matter if it's free nor how good you tell me it is.

I hope all those mobile gaming companies go out of business.

Tired of seeing people play pac-man on their phones and then telling people they are a hardcore gamer. You're as casual as casual gets.

The topic of the thread is "evil bad guy game developers". Zynga is a game developer and some people would describe them as evil bad guys. Your opinion about mobile games being not worthy of your time and casual vs. hardcore is totally irrelevant. Casual and hardcore are totally arbitrary terms that have no agreed upon definition and the only people who use those terms tend to be insecure pre-teens on forums and fifty year old industry analysts who haven't played a video game in their life.

[Graham Mitchell]

I mentioned Zynga because I read a quote somewhere from the CEO rather harshly ordering his staff to "copy what the other guys do as cheaply as possible" or something to that affect.

I'm addition, Zynga represents a very real threat to gaming as we know it. If everything becomes socially connected with a "free to play", microtransactions model (which everybody is blasting ea for) we'll never see anything like shin megami tensei or radiant silvergun ever again.

It most likely won't happen, but if Zynga had their way, they would push for that.

Edit: and since when would "hardcore gamers" like something "mainstream"? The two terms seem mutually exclusive to me. Cave shooters and anime-influenced dungeon crawlers with a dating sim built in are like video game punk rock. Only oddballs like us dig that stuff. You think I can get my gears of war/halo boning friend to play that stuff? Forget it. That stuffs for "weirdos" according to him.

[Tanooki]

WestWood, Dice, Maxis

Blackbox which hey only wanted but we at midway stole a lot of sales with NHL hitZ 2002 so before 03 was done they bought em, fired most, kept those willing to move and carried the name to ea Canada. 03 finished not by them wasn't as good and pro was so bad the series died. I worked in the team on 02 and man midway was blindsided and pissed.

Ea is to me Evil Alliance. Sure they're game makers but they're also company, IP, and employment murderers.

[JSoup]

Nobody's mentioned Zynga yet?

I have a friend who works for their office in San Francisco, apparently they offer decent benefits. Evil has it's payoff, I guess.

[JakeM]

Nobody's mentioned Zynga yet?

Don Matrick today became the head of it, so you can now expect all the coming casual games they make exclusive to XBOX ONE. :D

Yeah Activision, they need to do more to clean up COD's image. I mean, everyone who doesnt play COD hates the people who get on there and troll, its a horrible PR mess in there and they dont care.

[Graham Mitchell]

Don Matrick today became the head of it, so you can now expect all the coming casual games they make exclusive to XBOX ONE. :D
My worst nightmare has come true.



Yeah Activision, they need to do more to clean up COD's image. I mean, everyone who doesnt play COD hates the people who get on there and troll, its a horrible PR mess in there and they dont care.

They don't care because it continues to make money even in its current situation. I trolling and being able to make racist/homophobic remarks is the very reason people buy the games. If they started banning all those dudes they'd have no customer base anymore. Scary, ain't it?

[granz]

Atlus. Not Atlus Japan, per se. It's namely their English localization department that gets me. They make too many arbitrary and unjustifiable changes - both to the script and actual game content - and game scripts usually read like something that was written by a functional illiterate. It's like every character speaks in some mangled Southern dialect. What's more, the orthography fluctuates back and forth between U.S. and U.K. spelling variants.

My best guess is that they localization is handled entirely by native Japanese speakers. I guess some developers do this to save money. Do they not realize how much this hurts the game's quality, or do they simply not care? Given Atlus has been engaging in the same poor localization practices for over a decade, I'd bank on the latter.

[kupomogli]

I thought Atlus' localizations have been good. I don't like about them is their slapping SMT on everything they own just because it's a spinoff because the US fanbase doesn't know any better, such as SMT Persona 3, SMT DDS, SMT Devil Summoner, etc.

Also I don't like how they directly lie to their fanbase just to get additional sales. On the forums before Persona 3 launched, please localize FES repeatedly. They made the statement that they won't ever be localizing FES. Eight months later they release Persona 3 FES.

They're not a bad company at all, but ever since then I will never consider them my favorite publisher. Mainly that and they don't push out the constant quality they've released back then either. A lot of casual guaranteed to sell crap and shovelware alongside a few big name titles here and there is the new Atlus.

[LaughingMAN.S9]

EA gets a lot of unwarranted hate. They've came out with more good new IPs than most developers this generation. Similar to Sony, they also give their developers and contracted third party developers a large budget and freedom to do whatever with that budget.

Capcom is one of those borderline companies. With games like Resident Evil 6, even though it sucks, they did put a lot of money into making it a good game. Resident Evil Operation Raccoon City is another one that just happened to suck. There are good games like DMC DmC, Dragon's Dogma, Street Fighter 4, etc. With the games that do well though, games like Street Fighter 4 and Resident Evil 5, they have disc locked content or Super and Arcade rereleases, etc.

I agree with almost everything here, i say almost because i place capcom solely in the evil camp. They more than anyone break down games into chunks and sell it back to you piecemeal over time.


Ea rightfully got alot of hate for simcity, spore and mass effect 3, that last obe going a little overboard in my opinion, but overall, i probably own more ea published games than anything this generation, and outside of the fight night series, none of them are sports titles. Ea probably released more original ip this gen than anyone else


In my eyes tho, microsoft may be the worst offender, they nickel and dime their base, only really have like 3 exclusives, fuck over indies being the lowest common denominator, actually held back ps3 multiplatform games with being outright weaker and shady business practices.