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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.