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Scummiest publishers and the practices that earned them that title

Apdiddy

Member
Stardock - Based on the legal action taken against their ex-marketing director and Brad Wardell's behavior that lead to her quitting/trashing their marketing material. What she did wasn't cool either, but having Brad ask her to 'dress sexy' and other crappy stuff makes him and his company pretty scummy. And the result of the lawsuit was that the marketing director had to 'apologize' for her actions and pay the costs of the destroyed material, while Brad Wardell got away scot-free.
 
EA Access. It's a trojan horse aimed at getting you to buy digital and give up your ownership rights. Never assume corporations are working in your best interest.

^ This is the most recent example for EA IMO

But for non-disputable reasons: Dungeon Keeper, BF4 launch and subsequent months, Sim City 4, and so so many other practices.
 

Bisnic

Really Really Exciting Member!
EA

For so many reasons (Day 1 DLC, Season Passes, mandated microtransactions, accusing gamers of "not accepting innovation", etc) but mostly because of Bioware. I will never forgive them for what they have done to Bioware. Ever since they bought Bioware out they've churned out nothing but disappointments. It started with Dragon Age 2 with it's incredibly linear narrative and recycled assets. It continued with The Old Republic that you could just tell they cut funding half way through the character storyline a and then their monetization practices after going free to play are some of the worst I've ever seen. Then they pull that star child bullshit with ME3 and shove a multiplayer component in just to bleed people with bullshit microtransactions.

EA ruined one of my favorite studios of all times and no matter how good Dragon Age 3 might seem I just can't bring myself to believe it actually will be. The fact that I say that about a Bioware game breaks my heart.

You only have to blame Bioware on the star child. Do you really think EA has anything to do with the story of ME3? They're publishers, not story writers lol.

And the microtransactions in the multiplayer were optional. You could unlock stuff by spending ingame credits. Beside, i'm sure the microtransations were the reason we got free multiplayer DLCs, so for people like me who didn't use them.. it was great.

If you have one thing to blame EA for ME3, it's for rushing the game release when it was clearly not ready.
 

GECK

Member
NCsoft forging our Dear Lord British's hancock while he wasn't on the planet Earth is pretty scummy. Also costed him millions, but whatevehs.
Stardock - Based on the legal action taken against their ex-marketing director and Brad Wardell's behavior that lead to her quitting/trashing their marketing material. What she did wasn't cool either, but having Brad ask her to 'dress sexy' and other crappy stuff makes him and his company pretty scummy. And the result of the lawsuit was that the marketing director had to 'apologize' for her actions and pay the costs of the destroyed material, while Brad Wardell got away scot-free.

Brad Wardell introducing employees to actual bees in order to prove that they probably aren't allergic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPc9Z2Dn94U
 

Dremark

Banned
On disc DLC is a problem because it shouldn't be paid DLC in the first place. That's just putting arbitrary bits of a game behind a pay wall
ibcwEzn2XHddRy.gif

So if they left the content off the disc and made you download it, it would be alright?

It doesn't sound like the on disc part of DLC is what you really have issue with.
 

Brashnir

Member
^ This is the most recent example for EA IMO

But for non-disputable reasons: Dungeon Keeper, BF4 launch and subsequent months, Sim City 4, and so so many other practices.

Just a minor correction - Sim City 4 was actually OK. Its the one simply called "Sim City" (which would be Sim City 6 if you numbered them and counted Sim City Societies) that was the problem.
 
Chucklefish. They took the millions of dollars they got from people wanting them to make Starbound and apparently used it to become a game publisher. Meanwhile, aside from automated nightly builds that don't work, Starbound hasn't been updated at all in over six months.
 

balohna

Member
So if they left the content off the disc and made you download it, it would be alright?

It doesn't sound like the on disc part of DLC is what you really have issue with.

But on-disc is absolute proof that it was ready to go before the game even went off to manufacturing. One of the justifications of launch DLC, whether it's always the case or not, is that it can be developed while the game is in first party, being manufactured, etc.
 

CTLance

Member
Stardock - Based on the legal action taken against their ex-marketing director and Brad Wardell's behavior that lead to her quitting (...)
What the everloving fuck. I was a big fan of Stardock back in the day. Hoooooly shit. I feel dirty.
Brad Wardell introducing employees to actual bees in order to prove that they probably aren't allergic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPc9Z2Dn94U
youtube said:
[For those not aware, this was a skit, all participants knew these were drone bees]
Man, don't shock me like that.
 

Ushiwaka

Member
I love this stuff.

fheadsplatinum.gif

Just for the record, neither PG or Sega ever said anything about Microsoft, Sony or any other publishers saying no to publishing Bayo 2. It's all made up on the Internet.
All we know (officially) is that Sega didn't want to publish Bayo 2, Platinum insisted that the game gets made and the answer they got from Sega was a new partnership with Nintendo.

I came here for mentioning Sega and the Bayo 2 incident. Sega was a jerk. They don't publish the sequel, but fund an anime movie. I don't even know what is Sega's deal with Bayonetta anymore.
 

OG Loc

Member
Chucklefish. They took the millions of dollars they got from people wanting them to make Starbound and apparently used it to become a game publisher. Meanwhile, aside from automated nightly builds that don't work, Starbound hasn't been updated at all in over six months.

Whaaaaaaat?

Say it ain't so. I was hyped for Starbound, too. Smh.
 
So if they left the content off the disc and made you download it, it would be alright?

It doesn't sound like the on disc part of DLC is what you really have issue with.

Pretty much.

People equate a 100mb file download as being more worth it than a 100kb one. Same way how people bitch about digital games instead of their discs. Same content, you just are not paying for some extra plastic along with it (cause not like games come with manuals anymore)

Though I do bash capcom for their SFxT dlc. Not because it was on disc but because they were saying how much they were going to support this title for the long haul, and how they learned their lesson from SF4 dlc and what not. Turns out that planned support for a year was already done. It was a f up on multiple fronts.

And the argument that on-disc dlc means that it was done before hand and therefore should not be sold to consumers.... guess what. All dlc is made before they release the game, or at least in production. They are not coming up with this stuff months later, its planned out months/years in advance. The only example of that not happening I can think of is the Dark souls dlc simply because that was like a year after the game dropped.
 
Here, "scummy" doesn't have to mean "objectively illegal." This thread's for awful practices that don't necessarily break break contracts or laws. I only hear about this stuff when it's related to projects I'm interested in, so please share examples.

Bethesda's handling of the original version of Prey 2 and HumanHead counts as scummy. GAF thread about HH developer claiming Bethesda lied about Prey 2. Things start to get interesting around post #71 and Jason Schreier can't confirm the user n8rtot's posts, but says they match up with what he's heard in the past. kotaku would later report on the issue: Kotaku - leaked emails suggest Bethesda lied about Prey 2's development.

I should mention it here rather than link to it: (supposedly...) Bethesda's contract with HH required they meet progress milestones. Some HH people said development was progressing fine, yet Bethesda arbitrarily rejected what they had done so far and threatened to cancel development unless HH let themselves be bought by Bethesda, essentially holding their work on Prey 2 hostage. HH refused and Bethesda would go on to report that development wasn't meeting their quality standards (lol). Rumors would arise that Arkane (Dishonored) would be taking over the project and Bethesda reported that those rumors weren't true. Later, it would be revealed that Arkane was in fact starting over from scratch to work on Prey 2.

I feel especially bad since I impulse bought Wolfenstein for me and another person despite hearing all of this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Bethesda is pieces of shit and they've pulled that milestone nonsense with several devs. It's how they gobbled up Arkane to begin with to my understanding. fuckers. I expected to be the one to bring them up in this thread since they're so often overlooked when it comes to shitty asshole publishers bc skyram so gud, glad to see them at the forefront of the discussion where they deserve to be

It needed a lot of extra everything.

no, you're thinking Fallout 3.

New Vegas just needed extra bugfixing. Hella extra bugfixing. Not so surprising given the development circumstances (and fnv's narrative scope and quest design comparatively).

New Vegas was made in just over one year that shit is a miracle
 

Morrigan Stark

Arrogant Smirk
Activision for firing employees days before they were due to receive millions of dollars in royalties owed to them for a series that Activision made billions of dollars from and essentially saved them from irrelevancy. Oh, and Bobby Kotick following up the whole thing by saying, "I'd rather pay my lawyers than my employees."
Is there a source for that quote? That can't be real...
 
Bethesda is pieces of shit and they've pulled that milestone nonsense with several devs. It's how they gobbled up Arkane to begin with to my understanding. fuckers. I expected to be the one to bring them up in this thread since they're so often overlooked when it comes to shitty asshole publishers bc skyram so gud, glad to see them at the forefront of the discussion where they deserve to be

Yeah, make sure to check out this post about developer Madia from the thread linked in the OP.
 

link4117

Member
no, you're thinking Fallout 3.

New Vegas just needed extra bugfixing. Hella extra bugfixing. Not so surprising given the development circumstances (and fnv's narrative scope and quest design comparatively).

New Vegas was made in just over one year that shit is a miracle

Both needed more time. Apparently there was a lot of content cut and reworked to get to the release date. Plus the bugs you pointed out that still make the game unstable to this day despite official and fan patches. It's really disappointing that both aren't the games they wanted to be just to rush for a release date.
 
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