In recent years, video games have overtaken movies and TV to become the most profitable sector in the entertainment industry. Because of this, big video game publishers have been making billions of dollars hand-over-fist from gamers the world over. But with the recent popularity of microtransactions, predatory monetization techniques, and just bad game development, gamers around the world are starting to hate many of the same game publishers and studios they used to love. Here are five of the most hated video game publishers of all time and why the gaming community loves to hate them.
Most Hated Video Game Publishers of All Time
Activision-Blizzard
First off, let’s hit two birds with one stone by going over Activision-Blizzard, popularly shortened to Acti-Blizz. Activision and Blizzard used to be two different companies but merged together in 2008 to form Activision-Blizzard. In the early days of gaming, both Activision and Blizzard were beloved by the community for putting out innovative games that would shape the gaming landscape forever. Activision was behind some of the defining games of the 90s and 2000s, like Earthworm Jim, King’s Quest, Quake III: Arena, Spyro, Guitar Hero, and of course, Call of Duty. Blizzard was also responsible for many breakout hit franchises that defined a generation of gamers, like Warcraft, World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, and Hearthstone.
Many gamers love to hate on Call of Duty and its iterative, unoriginal yearly releases, designed to leech as much money off of series fans as humanly possible. Paying full triple-A game prices every year for a game series that seems like a copy-paste of the last game is not something that many gamers are willing to do. For the longest time, this seemed to be the harshest criticism of Activision; blatant unoriginality with no regard for player experience.
In recent years, though, Acti-Blizz has come under a lot of fire for a series of very questionable decisions and practices that have left gamers with a very bad taste in their collective mouth. Blizzard Entertainment, responsible for the genre and generation-defining hits I listed above, seemed to be tone-deaf to their fans’ wants. Hearthstone was, and still is, the most popular Collectible Card Game you can play online, but for years has been criticized for its pay-to-win model. Overwatch was a pretty decent entry into the hero shooter genre back in 2016, but a failure to listen to community feedback led to many fans abandoning the game after less than a year. At Blizzcon 2018, Blizzard Entertainment announced Diablo: Immortal, a mobile-only follow-up to their critically acclaimed Diablo series… and was subsequently booed off the stage by fans. Overwatch 2 was also announced in 2019, but as it seems to be more of a “content update” to the original game, many fans are skeptical about whether it’s worth the price tag of another full game.
With the Call of Duty series, things have been getting greedier and greedier as the game progress. With the success of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Activision and developer Infinity Ward revolutionized online multiplayer for first-person shooters. Unfortunately, almost every Call of Duty game since then hasn’t really innovated in the gameplay aspect but has made leaps and bounds in the monetization aspect. First, you just had to buy the full game in order to play the newest game, and that was it. However, since the dawn of microtransactions, Acti-Blizz has doubled down on the monetization of Call of Duty. In modern Call of Duty games, you can pay more money to buy CoD points, which you can then spend on weapon skins, battle passes, operator skins, and other visual effects. The Call of Duty: Mobile game is especially predatory, with missions, events, and loot boxes urging the player to come back time and again to spend even more money.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Behind the scenes, Acti-Blizz has been a horrible company for years. Discrimination, marginalization, and sexual harassment were all common in company offices. Just recently, these decades of bad behavior have finally come to light in a series of lawsuits filed against Acti-Blizz by the state of California. Fans, content creators, and the mainstream media have all slammed Acti-Blizz for allowing and even promoting this culture of harassment and inequality, with many rightly labeling them the most hated video game publishers of all time. CEO of Acti-Blizz, Bobby Kotick, apparently knew about all the sexual misconduct going on in his offices but didn’t do anything about it. Acti-Blizz shareholders are now calling for Kotick’s resignation, along with millions of fans demanding reparations to all victims of the predatory culture at Acti-Blizz.
Electronic Arts
If you thought Call of Duty was iterative and unoriginal, let me introduce you to Electronic Arts. EA used to be known mainly for their sports games, under EA Sports. The real-life sports leagues FIFA, NFL, NHL, UFC, and even the PGA Tour were all turned into video game franchises by EA Sports. As early as 1991, EA was already releasing almost the same game every year with John Madden Football ’92. Even today, criticisms of the newest FIFA and NFL games boil down to “they’re releasing the same game every year.”
EA was responsible for some defining and beloved videogame franchises like System Shock, Dead Space, Need For Speed, The Sims, Crysis, and Battlefield. However, even as early as 2012, EA was already being criticized as a money-hungry company, winning back-to-back “Most Hated Company in the USA” titles in 2012 and 2013. Fans saw through EA’s monetization schemes, with The Sims series kind of being the innovator of microtransactions with each game having a ton of expansions that you had to buy separately, but again, that is just the tip of the iceberg. In recent years, EA has also jumped on the monetization train, applying predatory monetization techniques to Star Wars: Battlefront, Apex Legends, FIFA, and Need For Speed.
EA is also known by the gaming community as a “killer” of indie game developers. Multiple studios have been acquired by EA over the years, starting with Ultima series developer Origin Systems back in 1992. Being bought by EA rarely turns out well for the company being bought, as EA is known for imposing unrealistic deadlines and targets, as well as murdering the soul of the indie developer’s beloved game by focusing on how they could squeeze more money out of it. To date, EA has acquired 39 companies, notably: Mass Effect and Dragon Age developer Bioware, Need for Speed and Burnout developer Criterion Software, The Sims and SimCity developer Maxis, and Titanfall developer Respawn Entertainment. To date, only 14 of these 39 studios survived, with most either going defunct or merging with another EA studio, making EA one of the most hated video game publishers to be bought by.
Ubisoft
In a global survey by Rave Reviews, Ubisoft topped the list of the most hated video game publishers in the world. This may come as a surprise to many gamers, but the numbers don’t lie, Mason. Ubisoft is responsible for really perfecting and fine-tuning the modern formula for open-world games, but it seems that implementing this formula in every game you publish wears thin pretty fast. Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed were two of the first games to really take advantage of a huge map with lots of interesting places and activities but since then, Ubisoft has rarely come up with many original ideas.
From the original Far Cry to the recently released Far Cry 6, the Far Cry formula has been honed and refined, but rarely ever innovated upon, and fans are getting tired of it. Even the Assassin’s Creed games, which used to be a slightly more linear kind of game that had a big world with lots of collectibles, has turned into yet another open-world RPG with the release of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. Even relatively new franchise Watch Dogs subscribes to this formula exclusively, leaving most Ubisoft games looking and feeling the same despite different concepts and settings. Some Ubisoft games do break the mold, like Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege, or innovate on the open-world formula a little bit, like Riders Republic.
While same-y video game releases aren’t a huge sin in and of itself, sexual misconduct and harassment definitely are. Ubisoft was also embroiled in sexual misconduct lawsuits in 2020, resulting in the resignation of many of the top leaders in Ubisoft. Editorial department head Serge Hascoët, Ubisoft Toronto co-founder Maxime Béland, and managing director of Ubisoft’s Canadian studios, Yannis Mallat were some of the high profile names who either resigned or were fired after an intense investigation by both Ubisoft itself and French newspaper Libération. It was found that “several employees had been found to have long records of sexual misconduct and troubling behavior, going back up to ten years, which had been dismissed by the human resources departments, but which had affected employee morale and game quality.”
Bethesda Softworks
Bethesda used to be the darling of the video game community. Both The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series were incredibly critically acclaimed, defining an entire sub-genre of RPGs. The director of these series, Todd Howard, was lauded as a brilliant director and producer, earning him the nickname “God Howard.” In the late 90s and 2000s, it seemed like Bethesda had a solid groundwork for developing hits, with their Creation Engine being a staple of their FPS-RPG games. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Fallout 3 remain two of the most popular games of all time, with Skyrim celebrating its ten-year anniversary earlier this month.
Even non-Fallout or TES games made by Bethesda up until the early 2010s were pretty decent, with Dishonored, the Doom remake, the Wolfenstein remake, and Rage all scoring pretty positive reviews from critics and fans alike. Unfortunately, Bethesda sat on their laurels too long and started earning the ire of the gaming community in 2015. With the release of Fallout 4, millions of fans were expecting a return to form for the series, with the same engaging plot, fleshed-out quests, and interesting NPCs present in most of Bethesda’s FPS-RPG games. However, what fans got leaned more heavily toward FPS than RPG. Critics and fans alike lambasted the absence of critical choices and deep dialogue, saying that Fallout 4 was a decent shooter game, but a bad Fallout game.
Predictably, many fans looked towards Bethesda’s other prized IP, The Elder Scrolls. Skyrim was released in 2011 and was one of the most influential games of all time, so surely Bethesda would be hard at work on the next iteration, right? At the time of writing, The Elder Scrolls VI is still in development after being announced in 2018. In the meantime, Bethesda saw fit to re-release Skyrim on three different console generations over the years, with four different editions and even a VR port. This move was universally criticized by fans of the series, seeing each edition and re-release as another cash grab by Bethesda.
While The Elder Scrolls series wouldn’t see another main game for more than 10 years, a couple of spin-off games were developed, both earning a lukewarm reception. The Elder Scrolls: Legends was Bethesda’s answer to the collectible card game craze, but to this day, no other CCG has been able to topple Hearthstone’s grip on the genre The Elder Scrolls: Online was Bethesda’s attempt at making an MMORPG with their engine and style of gameplay, but the MMO space is a tough market to conquer, with World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV dominating the market share.
The nail in the coffin for Bethesda was another attempt at a massively multiplayer game, this time with the Fallout IP and brand. Fallout 76 was released in 2018 and was immediately slammed by the entire gaming community for being the least Fallout-like Fallout game to ever release. The Fallout 76 release also came with the infamous pre-order fiasco that saw gamers receiving a low-quality nylon bag with their game instead of the high-quality canvas bag advertised in all of the pre-order advertisements. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for many gamers, with whispers of a class-action lawsuit against Bethesda over false advertising.
It wouldn’t be Fallout 76 that would bring a class-action lawsuit to Bethesda’s door, but surprisingly, Fallout 4. Just this year, a class-action lawsuit was launched that accused Bethesda of breach of contract, unjust enrichment, promissory estoppel (breaking a promise, even in the absence of a legal contract), deceit or fraud, fraudulent concealment, negligent misrepresentation, tort arising out of breach of contract, breach of express warranty, and violation of Maryland’s Consumer Protection Act. This came because of the Fallout 4 Season Pass promising access to all DLC in the game, then Bethesda not counting the Creation Club mod store as DLC, forcing players to purchase individual mods as microtransactions.
Riot Games
Finally, on our list of most hated video game publishers, we have Riot Games: a company that has been lighting up the gaming scene since the release of their first game in 2009, League of Legends. Riot Games has been absolutely dominating the gaming and esports scene for the past decade, with League of Legends being the world’s most played game for many years. After a decade of just League of Legends, Riot Games has rapidly expanded their portfolio of games to include Valorant, Teamfight Tactics, Legends of Runeterra, Ruined King: A League of Legends Story, Hextech Mayhem, and League of Legends: Wild Rift.
However, this esports giant has had some very public lawsuits lately due to an enormous amount of gender discrimination, racism, misogyny, and sexual misconduct and harassment allegations, spanning back to the start of the company. In 2018, Kotaku published an article about Riot Games’ culture of sexism. Dozens of women have come forward to accuse Riot Games employees of everything from inappropriate sexual remarks to straight-up rape. Riot Games itself has done little to discourage this behavior in the years it has been active, prompting a multitude of Riot employees to walk out of Riot Games’ offices in 2019 in protest of Riot’s handling of the ongoing sexual harassment lawsuits.
The state of California is on the side of the victims against Riot Games, with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing filing a lawsuit against Riot earlier this year, alleging that “Riot Games violated the law in multiple ways: gender discrimination in hiring, pay and promotion decisions; sexual harassment; and retaliation.” Riot Games chief operating officer Scott Gelb was known to harass men and women alike in the workplace. While Riot Games may be a relatively young company compared to the rest of our list, the sexist, racist, and sexually improper conduct that has been there since the start definitely earns them a place in the list of most hated video game publishers of all time.
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