Very much agree with this list 🙂
All companies making quality games that are about having fun, have depth, story… not to mention respectful communication with the players
Just because they are big doesnt mean they are good. The bigger a company gets is inverse to how they treat their customers for the most part for some reason.
Not always. Valve will be pretty high up, for example.
But yes, corporatisation of gaming companies tends to ruin things. When the finance guys and executives who only care about the bottom line run things, the quality of the product suffers as a result.
Valve as a video game Studio isn’t really that big. If they didn’t release a game every now and then, I’d swear they pretty much abandoned making video games.
Its a Ford v Dodge sort of issue where the customers take a back seat to the shareholders. The best companies seem always to be privately held and free to make business choices that will actively favor the customer over gouging them for every penny so the shareholder can buy a third Yacht. Valve isnt publicly traded for example. People will dog on Waffle House about fights and the like, but they stay open for emergencies, and have great resources for helping ex-cons get work and help them avoid recidivist behaviors. Also a privately held company. Eventually the guy at… Read more »
I’d put Hello Games in the top 10 as well. Sure NMS had a very bad start, so they’re not in top 5. But they’ve kept on bringing out major updates for almost a decade now, for free. Had it been almost any other studio, the second half of those updates at the very least would have been paid DLC. And the game would have likely had a season pass instead of the free expeditions to unlock stuff as well.
I’d definitely put them up there. Yeah they messed up the release, though in fairness that was a lot of pressure from Sony. They also went way beyond what would have been expected to
correct their mistake.
Concerned ape is up there too. The passion he put into Stardew Valley is amazing.
Amazing creativity, consistently horrible balancing and the most buggy and broken mess I have played since bethesda software and maybe on release cyberpunk. And that will never change. Also the tendency to abandon a lot of half finished content along the way, leaving behind tons of lose ends that go nowhere or feel underwhelming in their state. There are reasons for that, ofc. But I dislike how parts of their community often act like they can do no wrong, when that is far from the truth. Also dislike people blindly hating the game. I am MR 28 currently, still active,… Read more »
Digital extreme banned me permanently from warframe cause of a glitch from their own cheat detection and when i tried to prove my case with evidence and footage and data they said “too bad, we don’t care. You are banned this decision is irreversible.”
All Gamestudios that support a game for years and bring out new content without selling it. (like Iron Gate Studios with Valheim, The Fun Pimps with 7Days2Die)
I would say it would be mostly smaller to mid sized companies. People who put out a really good game or two, but hasn’t amassed hate. So it is probably a lot of companies people don’t know that well.
As much as I despise Nintendo for the Palworld lawsuit, I’m absolutely marble for the inevitable one DHS will receive for the “gotta catch em all” being used to promote ICE.
Ubisoft makes mid games that are largely inoffensive. People dont frequently think of Ubisoft in any capacity, much less negatively or positively. Regardless, its clear they’re in the bottom of the barrel.
Far Cry 5 had the balls to point out a phenomenon that later on got rebranded as maga. It’s cathartic now to play after the news. Also Ubisoft had a Kyiv and Odesa branch, my headcanon is that’s the real reason putin invaded. Moscow branch gave him a bad cd-key and now the world must pay.
Sureen Ink
1 month ago
I feel like Ubisoft, Bethesda, and Activision should all be lower down the list… Like, I know Nintendo has been scummy the last year, but that’s barely a drop in the bucket compared to those three companies…
Microsoft and Sony should also at least be down near where Nintendo is, too… Like, if we’re putting Nintendo so low for their practices this year, those two should definitely be even lower down.
But Activision still deserves to be the lowest, joke be damned. They collectively enjoyed sexually harassing a woman to death, until she killed herself, and that’s just the first page in the novel of their truly despicable behavior. They are anti-consumer, anti-gamer, corporate suit scumbags who have violated their players and their employees alike. It deserves to be stated whenever possible that no one is nearly as awful as Activision-Blizzard. They are the ones who deserve the shovel.
MJC
1 month ago
It’s probably bad for the game industry that there’s so many notable omissions from the visible part of this list. I chose to believe that both Xbox and Capcom are already underground. Xbox is self explanatory at this point. Capcom, try not caring about Street Fighter, Monster Hunter, or Resident Evil (I have tried, multiple times, none of them ever click with me) but being a huge fan of Mega Man, Dead Rising, and Ace Attorney. Oh please Mister Capcom, may we have a new game? Not another remake or collection of varying degrees of quality? No? You’re announcing a… Read more »
I do understand being bitter about Capcom focusing mostly on their big ticket franchises, I’m a Breath of Fire fan 😭
But, that’s a business decision, and I think throughout the years they’ve produced a ton of excellent games and I don’t remember any particular controversies around Capcom? I’d say (if I ignore my poor BoF, lol) Capcom have the best reputation of the ‘big companies’.
they tried to push an update, I believe it was SF V, that effectively contained a backdoor and would have posed a signifficant safety risk. Blew up for a bit, I think they reversed it and that was it. Didn’t really follow up on that one though.
And then ofc the general state of most of their PC releases I guess.
But yeah, I agree, all in all they have been doing pretty well
To be fair, Capcom barely cares about ace attorney. Sure, it’ll drag it around a bit to keep up appearances, but we haven’t had a new AA game in a while. At this point I’d take a ftp mobile gacha game.
Why does everyone always say “To be fair” right before something that isn’t fair? This statement isn’t even correct. Ace Attorney has been doing the best out of all the franchises I named, they actually finally localized and released games we missed out on when they first launched. All the collections are high quality, and they are going back to that first collection and bringing it up to the same standard as the newer collections. Compare that to Mega Man, where those collections have a list off issues a mile long, including a bunch of missing games. Capcom certainly cares… Read more »
What, you think deep, deep below EA they’ll eventually dig up Cloud Imperium Games?
leduk
1 month ago
tecent need to be way lower since they’re collaboration with the chinese gov imho. That’s a powerfull tool of government propaganda
Jedi
1 month ago
Wouldnt he need more like an excavator or something to get it deep enough ?
Martin
1 month ago
I know CAD is a comic about video games, but after more than a month of one-offs, I hope that in October, we will see a completely new, revolutionary Campaign storyline (it’s been over a year…) -although I would also still want to know what’s the deal with that half-elf princess…
Was looking for this comment. I think I’m more worried about the Jared Kushner connection than anything else. That’s a direct line to the US government.
SpinelesS
1 month ago
I wanna say Bethesda should be lower, but looking at the list of those below the only argument I can come up with to raise one of them higher is Nintendo is just greedy, their games don’t suck that much…
Me Me
1 month ago
They’re being bought by private equity, and many companies fail afterwards, because the buyer squeezes them for every penny they can and discards them when they are dry. Here’s to hoping EA suffers that fate.
MarthKoopa
1 month ago
Nintendo being that low and below Bethesda is inaccurate, and may be showing a lot of personal bias
Nintendo’s haters are only a very vocal minority on the internet. Most people love them, and for good reason.
Nintendo, is currently trying to patent features that a lot of games use. They are being sue happy over the wrong things.Yes they have a lot of classic games and what not but honestly they stopped innovating thirty years ago.
If we were going by “Most people”. The list would largely invert as most of the corporations people on the internet dislike, have most average people excuse and even lap up. Which is a reason on itself for drawing ire. Just imagine where Activision would be!! This is a very crude and quickly made for a visual gag list is about what the vocal people on the internet think. But if you want to argue which of the two is worse: Bethesda or Nintendo. Well… Nintendo is the one trying to monopolize an entire genre via patents because some parody… Read more »
Oh. Forgot also that Nintendo is also the most openly hostile of all when it comes to ANY attempt at game preservation in any form or function. Even if its an attempt to preserve a rom of a long forgotten game with no hope of a re-release anyway. They would rather have it become lost-media…
Dagroth
1 month ago
What did 2K do to be so low on the list? (I’m not saying they didn’t, I honestly don’t know)
Also is that guy reading a printed newspaper, outside of the Internet, like an animal?
jay hay
1 month ago
funny how every second comment is convinced the companies already depicted as abolute bottom tier should somehow be lower.
Most notably: Employee treatment and on-boarding conditions were reportedly terrible. Turned away from console game development and focused on making pachinko and slot machines for casinos. Boasted about mobile games being the ‘true future of gaming’ in the height of the mobile vs console/PC title wars. Fired Hideo Kojima despite all the success of Silent Hill P.T. and thus canning the Silent Hills project. (Albeit, Kojima apparently lied about some of his funding he got for MGSV having been put towards SH, so, grey area in the end.) ‘Physical’ copies of MGSV didn’t have the full game on disc for… Read more »
Pulse
1 month ago
nintendo still above konami, good enough.
Axiomite
1 month ago
Pretty sure that current trends will probably show Krafton on that bottom list there soon, if not having it be there already.
Rob
1 month ago
All I wanted was a new Skate game, which I would have been happy to pay for, but instead I got a businessman’s idea of a free-to-play skateboarding game and an AI (Vee) that has no idea that everyone who’s ever touched a board already knows that footy means footage.
J.D.
1 month ago
Challenge Everything !!
Cmd1095
1 month ago
Clearly EA saw that Nintendo was gunning for their position and wanted to try and secure it
Phire
1 month ago
Lower it? Are we sure this won’t be an improvement?
Pardon, I meant, that’s NOT just worst gaming company. Worst company, period.
Birdbath
1 month ago
I mean Zynga might be lower, but not by much
Daminica
1 month ago
Making EA worse than it already is is very hard. But that doesn’t mean someone has to say “Bet!” Dangit.
Quanion
1 month ago
As much as I dislike that buyer, they might cleanse future game releases from politics. (Both sides) This could calm some things down. Could…
SpinelesS
1 month ago
Been thinking about it, and as long as they don’t go even crazier with microtransactions, this may improve EA’s standing in my eyes.
I mean I really don’t see a Saudi company making something like Veilguard…
Drakin
1 month ago
To EA – “You’re down to earth… but not down far enough.”
Cypher
1 month ago
I find this reaction odd. Niantic was sold to Scopely(Saudi’s Savvy Game Group). You would think there would be more hate on that alone, considering Niantic through it’s years of games relied heavily on players to go around in real life to take pictures and update data for their game. Yet, Niantic was huge on microtransactions, did little to protect player-base from threats, and translated poor signal as cheating. So, for the security-minded, Niantic essentially sold pictures of American communities to Saudis in what is a 3.5 billion data gathering coup de grace. Activision is almost amateur in comparison.
24
Rethorical question, but I’m kinda curious. Who is on top here?
Team Cherry.
Larian, Team Cherry, Supergiant Games would be my picks.
Very much agree with this list 🙂
All companies making quality games that are about having fun, have depth, story… not to mention respectful communication with the players
So the bigger they are the lower on the billings they are?
Just because they are big doesnt mean they are good. The bigger a company gets is inverse to how they treat their customers for the most part for some reason.
It certianly seems like there’s a corollary… I mean there are exceptions I’m sure…… somewhere….
Not always. Valve will be pretty high up, for example.
But yes, corporatisation of gaming companies tends to ruin things. When the finance guys and executives who only care about the bottom line run things, the quality of the product suffers as a result.
Valve isn’t really a game company they are game distribution platform and hardware company. They really dont make them anymore.
Exactly! We’re all gonna die waiting for Half-Life 3.
Valve as a video game Studio isn’t really that big. If they didn’t release a game every now and then, I’d swear they pretty much abandoned making video games.
Valve definitely USED to be up there, but why would they still be? When’s the last time they actually produced a game? Portal 2 was in 2011.
Half-Life Alyx I think?
Its a Ford v Dodge sort of issue where the customers take a back seat to the shareholders. The best companies seem always to be privately held and free to make business choices that will actively favor the customer over gouging them for every penny so the shareholder can buy a third Yacht. Valve isnt publicly traded for example. People will dog on Waffle House about fights and the like, but they stay open for emergencies, and have great resources for helping ex-cons get work and help them avoid recidivist behaviors. Also a privately held company. Eventually the guy at… Read more »
Enshittification
There are exceptions but that is generally the case in my opinion.
I’d put Hello Games in the top 10 as well. Sure NMS had a very bad start, so they’re not in top 5. But they’ve kept on bringing out major updates for almost a decade now, for free. Had it been almost any other studio, the second half of those updates at the very least would have been paid DLC. And the game would have likely had a season pass instead of the free expeditions to unlock stuff as well.
I’d definitely put them up there. Yeah they messed up the release, though in fairness that was a lot of pressure from Sony. They also went way beyond what would have been expected to
correct their mistake.
Concerned ape is up there too. The passion he put into Stardew Valley is amazing.
What about Digital Extreme? Nobody really has anything bad to say about Warframe 🙂
Amazing creativity, consistently horrible balancing and the most buggy and broken mess I have played since bethesda software and maybe on release cyberpunk. And that will never change. Also the tendency to abandon a lot of half finished content along the way, leaving behind tons of lose ends that go nowhere or feel underwhelming in their state. There are reasons for that, ofc. But I dislike how parts of their community often act like they can do no wrong, when that is far from the truth. Also dislike people blindly hating the game. I am MR 28 currently, still active,… Read more »
Digital extreme banned me permanently from warframe cause of a glitch from their own cheat detection and when i tried to prove my case with evidence and footage and data they said “too bad, we don’t care. You are banned this decision is irreversible.”
There is occasionally, but DE usually does address complaints and problems when they can and communicate when possible.
Throw in Sandfall Interactive for now, too.
Interactive fate 🙂
From Software, thatgamecompany… I’m sure I’m forgetting other contenders but they came to mind.
I wouldn’t put them there personally, but I think a lot of people are going to have Valve on top.
are they still making games?
It’s a list of video game companies, not video game developers. Valve is absolutely a video game company.
All Gamestudios that support a game for years and bring out new content without selling it. (like Iron Gate Studios with Valheim, The Fun Pimps with 7Days2Die)
Probably indie studios or companies with one hit wonders.
The guy who made Stardew Valley.
He’s made a great game with no paid DLC and engages with the community
Concerned Ape.
Wayforward may not be at the very top, but it deserves to be up there.
ConcernedApe also somewhere near the top.
I would say it would be mostly smaller to mid sized companies. People who put out a really good game or two, but hasn’t amassed hate. So it is probably a lot of companies people don’t know that well.
Hello Games.
Re-Logic is absolutely towards the top.
How is Ubisoft so high?
I want to say nintendo should also be lower, but it’s hard to beat activision(blizzard(microsoft))
Nintendo has one major quality. It treats it’s employees very well.
Nintendo has a lot of fanbois who will love them and defend them no matter what.
same said about everyone else, we just find it funny everyone hates nintendo doing what the others already were. suddenly its super bad
Fewer and fewer every day with the way they’re not happy with the golden eggs so are fattening up the goose…
As much as I despise Nintendo for the Palworld lawsuit, I’m absolutely marble for the inevitable one DHS will receive for the “gotta catch em all” being used to promote ICE.
Had the same thought. But when seeing the names below it, it makes sense. Which should be worrying in and off itself.
None of the ones we can read are high, they’re like the bottom five out of hundreds.
Ubisoft makes mid games that are largely inoffensive. People dont frequently think of Ubisoft in any capacity, much less negatively or positively. Regardless, its clear they’re in the bottom of the barrel.
Far Cry 5 had the balls to point out a phenomenon that later on got rebranded as maga. It’s cathartic now to play after the news. Also Ubisoft had a Kyiv and Odesa branch, my headcanon is that’s the real reason putin invaded. Moscow branch gave him a bad cd-key and now the world must pay.
I feel like Ubisoft, Bethesda, and Activision should all be lower down the list… Like, I know Nintendo has been scummy the last year, but that’s barely a drop in the bucket compared to those three companies…
Nintendo has been scummy ever since they stole the IP of Tetris and never paid a single dime to the creator. Maybe even before that.
the only use they did not sue was ICE fucking catch them all advert
Microsoft and Sony should also at least be down near where Nintendo is, too… Like, if we’re putting Nintendo so low for their practices this year, those two should definitely be even lower down.
If Activision was any lower on the list, it would defeat the joke.
But Activision still deserves to be the lowest, joke be damned. They collectively enjoyed sexually harassing a woman to death, until she killed herself, and that’s just the first page in the novel of their truly despicable behavior. They are anti-consumer, anti-gamer, corporate suit scumbags who have violated their players and their employees alike. It deserves to be stated whenever possible that no one is nearly as awful as Activision-Blizzard. They are the ones who deserve the shovel.
It’s probably bad for the game industry that there’s so many notable omissions from the visible part of this list. I chose to believe that both Xbox and Capcom are already underground. Xbox is self explanatory at this point. Capcom, try not caring about Street Fighter, Monster Hunter, or Resident Evil (I have tried, multiple times, none of them ever click with me) but being a huge fan of Mega Man, Dead Rising, and Ace Attorney. Oh please Mister Capcom, may we have a new game? Not another remake or collection of varying degrees of quality? No? You’re announcing a… Read more »
I do understand being bitter about Capcom focusing mostly on their big ticket franchises, I’m a Breath of Fire fan 😭
But, that’s a business decision, and I think throughout the years they’ve produced a ton of excellent games and I don’t remember any particular controversies around Capcom? I’d say (if I ignore my poor BoF, lol) Capcom have the best reputation of the ‘big companies’.
they tried to push an update, I believe it was SF V, that effectively contained a backdoor and would have posed a signifficant safety risk. Blew up for a bit, I think they reversed it and that was it. Didn’t really follow up on that one though.
And then ofc the general state of most of their PC releases I guess.
But yeah, I agree, all in all they have been doing pretty well
To be fair, Capcom barely cares about ace attorney. Sure, it’ll drag it around a bit to keep up appearances, but we haven’t had a new AA game in a while. At this point I’d take a ftp mobile gacha game.
Why does everyone always say “To be fair” right before something that isn’t fair? This statement isn’t even correct. Ace Attorney has been doing the best out of all the franchises I named, they actually finally localized and released games we missed out on when they first launched. All the collections are high quality, and they are going back to that first collection and bringing it up to the same standard as the newer collections. Compare that to Mega Man, where those collections have a list off issues a mile long, including a bunch of missing games. Capcom certainly cares… Read more »
I wouldn’t consider it a full list, since there are a lot of hated companies. He just picked some big ones, that are well known to be h
Be careful that you don’t dig too deep and too greedily.
What, you think deep, deep below EA they’ll eventually dig up Cloud Imperium Games?
tecent need to be way lower since they’re collaboration with the chinese gov imho. That’s a powerfull tool of government propaganda
Wouldnt he need more like an excavator or something to get it deep enough ?
I know CAD is a comic about video games, but after more than a month of one-offs, I hope that in October, we will see a completely new, revolutionary Campaign storyline (it’s been over a year…) -although I would also still want to know what’s the deal with that half-elf princess…
If you join CAD/Tim’s Patreon, you will be able to see all the different storylines and comics tim has put together.
Bethesda…. better rep than Nintendo?!?!?!?
Nintendo’s lawyers have done a great job of dragging their name through the mud lately.
Bought by Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner. You’re going to be digging deep.
Was looking for this comment. I think I’m more worried about the Jared Kushner connection than anything else. That’s a direct line to the US government.
I wanna say Bethesda should be lower, but looking at the list of those below the only argument I can come up with to raise one of them higher is Nintendo is just greedy, their games don’t suck that much…
They’re being bought by private equity, and many companies fail afterwards, because the buyer squeezes them for every penny they can and discards them when they are dry. Here’s to hoping EA suffers that fate.
Nintendo being that low and below Bethesda is inaccurate, and may be showing a lot of personal bias
Nintendo’s haters are only a very vocal minority on the internet. Most people love them, and for good reason.
Nintendo, is currently trying to patent features that a lot of games use. They are being sue happy over the wrong things.Yes they have a lot of classic games and what not but honestly they stopped innovating thirty years ago.
Most people don’t care about the lawsuits, or even know about it in the first place
If we were going by “Most people”. The list would largely invert as most of the corporations people on the internet dislike, have most average people excuse and even lap up. Which is a reason on itself for drawing ire. Just imagine where Activision would be!! This is a very crude and quickly made for a visual gag list is about what the vocal people on the internet think. But if you want to argue which of the two is worse: Bethesda or Nintendo. Well… Nintendo is the one trying to monopolize an entire genre via patents because some parody… Read more »
Oh. Forgot also that Nintendo is also the most openly hostile of all when it comes to ANY attempt at game preservation in any form or function. Even if its an attempt to preserve a rom of a long forgotten game with no hope of a re-release anyway. They would rather have it become lost-media…
What did 2K do to be so low on the list? (I’m not saying they didn’t, I honestly don’t know)
Also is that guy reading a printed newspaper, outside of the Internet, like an animal?
funny how every second comment is convinced the companies already depicted as abolute bottom tier should somehow be lower.
I guess I’m out of the loop… what did Konami do?
Most notably: Employee treatment and on-boarding conditions were reportedly terrible. Turned away from console game development and focused on making pachinko and slot machines for casinos. Boasted about mobile games being the ‘true future of gaming’ in the height of the mobile vs console/PC title wars. Fired Hideo Kojima despite all the success of Silent Hill P.T. and thus canning the Silent Hills project. (Albeit, Kojima apparently lied about some of his funding he got for MGSV having been put towards SH, so, grey area in the end.) ‘Physical’ copies of MGSV didn’t have the full game on disc for… Read more »
nintendo still above konami, good enough.
Pretty sure that current trends will probably show Krafton on that bottom list there soon, if not having it be there already.
All I wanted was a new Skate game, which I would have been happy to pay for, but instead I got a businessman’s idea of a free-to-play skateboarding game and an AI (Vee) that has no idea that everyone who’s ever touched a board already knows that footy means footage.
Challenge Everything !!
Clearly EA saw that Nintendo was gunning for their position and wanted to try and secure it
Lower it? Are we sure this won’t be an improvement?
That’s a real deficit if being owned by Saudi Arabi and Trump’s son in law raises you up….
Yeah, that was kinda my point.
EA’s already SOOOO terrible, that even being owned by Saudi Arabia might well be an improvement.
I mean they literally won “worst company in the world”, two years in a row.
That’s just just worst gaming company….
Pardon, I meant, that’s NOT just worst gaming company. Worst company, period.
I mean Zynga might be lower, but not by much
Making EA worse than it already is is very hard. But that doesn’t mean someone has to say “Bet!” Dangit.
As much as I dislike that buyer, they might cleanse future game releases from politics. (Both sides) This could calm some things down. Could…
Been thinking about it, and as long as they don’t go even crazier with microtransactions, this may improve EA’s standing in my eyes.
I mean I really don’t see a Saudi company making something like Veilguard…
To EA – “You’re down to earth… but not down far enough.”
I find this reaction odd. Niantic was sold to Scopely(Saudi’s Savvy Game Group). You would think there would be more hate on that alone, considering Niantic through it’s years of games relied heavily on players to go around in real life to take pictures and update data for their game. Yet, Niantic was huge on microtransactions, did little to protect player-base from threats, and translated poor signal as cheating. So, for the security-minded, Niantic essentially sold pictures of American communities to Saudis in what is a 3.5 billion data gathering coup de grace. Activision is almost amateur in comparison.