Hey, did you know? Capitalism is bad and the people who make the major decisions in this industry end up being capitalists of just truly shitty proportions. Abusive practices, harassment of their employees, underpaying, breaking of labour laws, actively including content that is racist, transphobic, white supremacist, etc, and hundreds of other abuses that, even if I didn't work adjacent to this industry, I would find inexcusable.
So here's the developers I've decided that, hey, maybe I shouldn't give money to these assholes if I can help it.
This is a living list and will be added to as more developers and publishers have their shittiness dragged out into the light
Remember: Fucking Unionize.
Toys for Bob for going independent!
Cyan Worlds for making a game that was just lousy with Generative A.I. (Firmament)
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The one that started it all. The EA Spouse blog dragged this shit into the light for the first time for many people outside of the industry. I have heard for years to stay away from EA unless I want to be chewed up and spat out.
Fuck Activision. That's all. That's the explanation. Fuck em.
While ND deserves inclusion for the sexual abuse of a developer by one of the executives of the company being swept under the rug, 2020's release of The Last of Us 2 really opened the floodgates on just how shitty it is to work at Naughty Dog. And it has nothing to do with the office pet policy.
Never put a company on a pedestal when they haven't earned that spot. A bit of free Witcher 3 dlc and people were ready to claim they were the second coming of Jesus fucking Christ. But if Cyberpunk 2077 will be remembered for anything (and, given the reviews so far, it's not gonna be for being a revolutionary game), it's going to be just how much shit CDPR decided they could get away with when they dangle the shiniest toy in front of the gaming public. Because between transphobic PR reps, grossly misguided attempts at "representation" that somehow managed to make adding transgender options more transphobic than leaving them out, white supremacy memes in the text of the game, crunching developers, promising you're not going to crunch your developers and crunching them anyways, promising you're not going to crunch your developers and having it exposed that *you've already been crunching your developers for almost a year*, some truly ugly and out of left field antisemitism, becoming the gold standard for "edgelord marketing" in video games, and, not least of all, creating a game that is shockingly similar to what one would make if they wanted to *kill people with epilepsy*, I don't want to even give this studio my attention let alone my money. I deleted my Good Old Games account at the first disgusting thing they pulled on that list. The fact that it got so much worse has not made me regret that decision.
One of the few times I will ever be glad that the rights for games were in the hands of the publisher, not the developer. Fuck you Mike Z.
2020 is a year we all want to forget, but if you remember one thing from this year, remember just how badly executives at Ubisoft sexually harassed and abused their employees. Dec 2021: aaand now they're doing NFTs
Reminder: Rockstar had their developers working 100+ hour weeks to make Red Dead Redemption 2. That's approximately less than 12 hours off a week if we assume they were also getting a healthy amount of sleep, which they no doubt weren't.
I mean, I already mentioned EA so BioWare should be implied from that, but Bioware deserves some special mention over just how the crunch culture at this game developer (tied with EA's ruthlessness on meeting release dates) have resulted in their last two games being utter failures that more care, better management, and less ridiculous demands from the publisher could have easily been classics of their respective genres.
Not even when getting Disney money did Epic Games ever pay those kids they stole those dances from. Or stop crunching the Fortnite team from what I've heard. Here's a good trick tho: Always claim the free games on the Epic Game Store. It's a pretty reliable way to take Epic's money and throw it to a developer that deserves it more than they do. So yeah, there are valid reasons to hate on Epic. They don't have to involve you being a racist pig and basing it's on them being partly owned by a Chinese company (Somehow I am supposed to believe that is worse than it being owned by an American one) and/or you being a simp for Gabe Newell. Oh, and speaking of Valve...
Fuck Valve. They've had over a decade to curb their community around steam from being an alt-right breeding ground and a haven for harassing developers, but haven't done a single fucking thing. And I'm sick of it. If I never have to buy a game on Steam again, it'll be too soon. And it's not just Steam that cements Valve on this list. Their corporate structure, while being praised on a surface level for being "flatter" than most companies and "not having bosses", hides this clique-y power dynamic that leaves every developer in a state of anxiety, fear, backstabbing, and cutthroat competition with their other employees. Turns out structure is important, especially the part of structure that protects employees.
