3mo ago

What video game company/developer/publisher loves shitting on it's fans?

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.

54 comments

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
- Their war on emulation is the reason I'll never buy Nintendo again.
  
  Same.
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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
- TBF, the Smash Bros community brought their all-but-destruction on themselves. The rest is pretty valid, though.
  
  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.
  
  If we're going to destroy entire competitive scenes over a handful of bad actors, there would be no competitive games ever.
  
  Nah Nintendo has hated Melee in particular basically since Brawl released as it continues to compete with new releases. More recently a community made online + rollback mod has drawn Nintendos usual emulation ire.
- 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.
  
  No, secondhand market sellers are just greedy.

I'll say Ubisoft. I don't think I need to explain why.
- This was one of my favorite lines from the show. I snorted reading this 🐽
- 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.

Cloud Emperium Games and Star Citizen.
They constantly lie about all sorts of matters (progress, release dates, financial matters, state of the company).
Many of their senior community managerw are openly disrespectful to their backers.
The founder, Chris Roberts, put his unqualified wife as CMO (she openly admitted to not knowing how metrics worked or what is SEO), while coming up with a fake last name for her and warning employees to keep their mouths shut about the fact they were married.

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

EA. Remember 'A sense of pride and accomplishment?' as their justification for star wars battlefront ii remake with Darth Vader be absurdly expensive.
- 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.
  
  When I was a kid I got spore (on CD)
  Installer crashed
  Installer crashed
  Installer crashed
  You have used up your limit of 3 installs, if you want to play buy a new disk.
  Luckily a family friend was good with computers and managed to force it to work anyway but it was my first and last experience with EAs bullshit.
- "Nobody wants a Pink Vader..."

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 😠

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.

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.

Nintendo.

I loved Rocket League, was top 1%, and quit it because of the casual game ban you eat when leaving poorly matched games. I already wasn‘t playing ranked anymore cause I reached my goal so I just liked to play casual games.
I didn‘t mind people leaving casual games or leaving myself cause the outcome of the match didn‘t matter, what mattered was whether it was a well-matched game that was fun to play or not. And if it wasn‘t, you left and went back into queue, and it took like five seconds to match a new game.
Which is also why I didn‘t mind if my team was leaving. I just shrugged, went into a new queue, five seconds later I was back in the game.
But nah, nowadays devs gotta have this weird obsession over forcing people to play matches out even if there‘s no stakes other than whether you‘re having fun or not and even though there‘s no victims here with the outcome being irrelevant and the queue timers being super low. It also doesn‘t matter how much time into a match has passed, the game‘s the same at minute 1 as it is at minute 3 or 5, you‘re not losing progress as in a MOBA or RTS match.
It breeds toxicity too: Instead of leaving, people now feel forced to stay, so they‘re just in there, pissed off, and take it out on their teammates.
Just allaround a dumb change likely initiated by a vocal minority of the playerbase.
Like, fuck quitting ranked games, but casual? Unnecessary.
Rant end. This change annoyed me af too when it happened, so I can definitely relate to OP.
EDIT: I do think there‘s worse offenders with regards to the post’s topic though. Ubisoft, EA, anyone using Denuvo or patching in mtx after launch, Paradox and their crazy dlc policy, KOEI and their crazy dlc policy for DOA (and probably other stuff), etcetc
- Thank christ, someone understands. If you tried saying anything similar to what you've said in most Rocket League communities, main or self-created, you got put on blast.
  Nobody should ever have their fun dampened because someone doesn't want to be a team player or intentionally grief or throw matches. I entirely understand it in Competition/Ranked, but I'll never agree with how Casual Mode is handled. Psyonix is just asking people to try and stop playing or even supporting their game through MTX.
  
  Well, there‘s your vocal minority. Some people act as if you’re breaching a contract on performing lifesaving brain surgery when you leave a lobsided casual game. And for some reason they can‘t just take that attitude and stick to ranked. It blows my mind that Psyonix caved in on that, but here we are.
- God I hated that change so much. I only play 2v2 ranked with my buddy now. I never play anything else anymore.
  There was no reason to ruin casual like that. I remember all the whiners on the RL subreddit saying crap like "I want to play a full match with a team!" and all I could think was, then go fucking play ranked! They like to drop terms like "not sweating" to justify ruining casual. Really?? If you don't give a crap about ranking then who cares what ranking you are in ranked matches? Just go play ranked! And if you're that mentally weak, then yell at epic to let you hide your ranking from being displayed after matches instead of ruining an entire game mode.
  I miss having a zero commitment game mode that I can pop in while waiting for my buddy to take a dump or something. Now casual is just ranked without the ranking. It still has mmr, you can't leave without bans, it's absolutely pointless and might as well not exist. Let me go get my ass slapped by a grandmaster! Or let me show off to a bunch of bronzies. It hurts no one.

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.

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.