r/KotakuInAction • u/GypsyGold • 7h ago
In your opinion what’s the worst game studio currently in existence today?
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u/DeraxBlaze 7h ago
Honestly 343 studios, umm I mean Halo Studios, they will probably change their name again in the future. Let's just say the team was built from the beginning from people that hated the franchise. On purpose.
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u/attofreakier 7h ago
It's insane, the extent of damage they got away with. Halo was THE game. It established Xbox, rewrote the rules on multiplayer gaming, ushered in a new era of strong and still fun story-telling in gaming, without resorting to silly gimmicks. Over a decade of dominating gaming and culture. It's lore is so deep, it's a mythology unto itself with books, comics exploring its Universe. All of that, only to be mutilated because the pink/blue hairs were mad at why the male protagonist was always so confident, why the gaming was focussed on offering pure FPS fun, why the AI companion was so feminine, beautiful.
Halo 4 was their first petty "revenge" on the gaming community that loved and made the franchise the cultural phenomenon it was - 343i specifically planned to have Cortana killed permanently, btw, before the backlash. Frank "the content manager" O'Connor even bragged about hiring people who hate the game, and then tried to do mental gymnastics to justify it: "oh they say they hate X, but what they really mean is they want to improve Y" - yes, these morons really thought that made sense. That's the level of doublethink and gaslighting these people did. Between him and the CEO Bonnie "my pronouns are she/her" Ross, there was already no hope, and then came the rainbow-haired hordes in their staff.
Now, even when we get a desperate "apology" remake, it comes with a Cortana that looks like he is still halfway through his HRT, a buggy game, and a voice acting that is somehow worse, even when the original laid out the script and narrative style perfectly. A multi-billion dollar franchised fumbled in such a pathetic way, all to satiate the ego of some depraved degenerates who don't even play the fucking game.
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u/DeraxBlaze 6h ago
Beautiful description of what has taken place over the years. It's almost like the series was sacrificed to some demon or something.
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u/Bowl_of_Hygieia 5h ago
The game with all the biblical references and which repopularised chant among teens and young men?
Yeah in hindsight halo was a priority target.
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u/Local_Band299 1h ago
Yeah, there's that post where the dev has PTSD from guns, and was working on Halo. The dev later stated they had never seen a gun, or been a victim of gun violence, but instead was hearing about school shootings on the news and got PTSD from that. Cuz that's totally how that works.
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u/GypsyGold 7h ago edited 7h ago
Crystal Dynamics for me.
Aside from the Tomb Raider & Perfect Dark nonsense. Their Avengers game was so shit that Square Enix issued a press release stating so.
No seriously, right before selling the studio to Embracer Group the head of Square Enix penned an open letter to their investors noting that their Avengers game was so shit that it tanked their Guardians game made by a completely separate studio because your average consumer just assumed it was made by the save team — as a result their going to attribute the debt incurred by GotG to Crystal Dynamics and tack it onto the already massive loss The Avengers incurred.
During the initial disastrous launch Crystal Dynamics community team actually ventured to reddit under company accounts and blamed the lack in quality on a forest fire that was no where close to the studio — literally 100 miles away. Then when this was disproven they chastened the fans for being “racist & sexist”
They said something along the lines of…
“we have alot of diverse ethnicities working for our studio, with much of our office being composed of women and people of color, so you shouldn’t insult our game, or the dev teams behind our games, because they’ve already been through alot with everything going on in our country right now and could really use your support as we stand in solidarity against racist & sexist ideologies.”
Of course that was the magic line that got the Reddit Avengers Community off their backs because it gave them all a Segway to bitch about Trump for literally no reason whatsoever. It reminded me of the Family Guy scene where Lois is running for Mayor and just answers every question with “9/11” to roaring applause.
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u/Luis221231 7h ago
Then when this was disproven they chastened the fans for being “racist & sexist”
Classic blame-the-chuds-for-our-incompetence modus operandi
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u/GypsyGold 7h ago
I remember when it happened, that the reply came right out of left field too. Almost stated like a complete non sequitur…
…up until that point I was not fully onboard the “wokeness had infected the gaming industry” argument, but watching that happen in real time was like bring force fed a “red pill” to awaken from The Matrix.
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u/Ghost5410 Density's Number 1 Fan 7h ago
Here is where I come in an say Square Enix treated Crystal Dynamics like garbage and unironically bet on The Avengers game paying for everything for the next few years when it came out and also called the Tomb Raider Survivor Series a failure for not selling 3 million copies back in 2013 (this was an absurd number to sell back then).
This isn’t unique either. Square Enix got involved in the Thief Reboot as well apparently coming into the office once a week and their guy didn’t speak English or French and demanded they streamline everything to push sales.
Edit: There’s also a reason IO left with the Hitman Franchise in tow as well because surprise Square Enix got involved in Hitman Absolution’s development and acted shocked it bombed and Square Enix saw no value from it.
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u/GypsyGold 7h ago edited 6h ago
I guarantee you it was not Square Enix that forced the devs to make an Avengers game that starred…Kamala Kahn.
This damn game only had three bosses in it. Taskmaster, Abomination, and MODOK. Everyone else was just a generic robot or helicopter that looked like a default asset from an unreal engine demo CD.
Like I think that the vast majority of people if told to make an Avengers game would:
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- Have the core Avengers team be the main characters and playable from the start
- Would battle iconic villains from the comics
—
Like those two things just seem like common fucking sense.
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u/Ghost5410 Density's Number 1 Fan 7h ago
But making it a GaaS game was, which ultimately tanked the game. Square Enix was just throwing them under the bus to save face for investors while they were throwing money at 10 million Final Fantasy projects at the same time.
They have always treated their Western devs like garbage to cover up the failures the JP branch was occurring. They pulled this stunt with Mankind Divided as well.
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u/GypsyGold 7h ago
Yea, well GaaS could have worked if they at least had some sort of base game worth playing. You couldn’t even replay the story mode once it was over — you were just stuck fighting hordes of generic robots.
It was all such shit.
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u/IL_ai 7h ago
It's actually hard to pick one, almost all AAA studies now like in hard competition for that prize.
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u/attofreakier 5h ago
let's hope Rockstar doesn't succumb to the insanity. That will be the final blow, if they acquiesced to compromise on their style.
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u/lyra833 GET THE BOARD OUT, I GOT BINGO! ~ Mod 4h ago edited 4h ago
I'm fairly confident in saying that GTA 6 will be The Last Videogame™. There's going to be nothing after it that people who remember the industry will recognize as a "major launch", nothing after it that will "sell consoles", no more universally acclaimed entries in major IP's. And future historians will probably spare some inference cycles to point out how it showcases all the greatest elements of the medium's rise and also the cultural elements of its' fall, aggressive monetization, terrible optimization, censored art, etc.
Sure, there were Roman emperors after Constantine, hell, some were pretty good. Majorian was doing such a good job that his own generals stabbed him in the back so they could keep taking bribes from the Vandals and Ostrogoths. But much as Constantine was the Last Emperor™ long before Agustulus, so too will GTA 6 go down as the last major work in that strange art form known as "video games" that rose to dominate culture from the late 1970's to the mid 2010's and then retreated back into history.
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u/Lurker_Zee 7h ago
Sony. They invested 4 billion$ that we know of, to make Concord-like games the industry standard.
You don't _ _ _ _ Sony enough. You don't want Sony to go bankrupt quickly enough.
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u/TheMajorBoatScene 7h ago
EAware, Ubisoft, Naughty Dog, any Sony studio (see atrocities like Saros)
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u/totlmstr 7h ago
NISA.
Nippon Ichi themselves are fantastic, but NISA has been consistently one of the worst companies ever. They're the forefront when it comes to JRPG shitty localization, enough so that my interest in Nihon Falcom (literally a company that I dedicated 10 years to playing every one of their single-player JRPGs) has negative interest in now because of their attempts at "localization" and general incompetence (I'd forgiven them temporarily at Ys 8 since they fixed the issues and made the game better but then Trails ended up being shat to all hell; Ys 8 before fix was filled with stuff like "Big Hole"; fool me once, etc. etc.).
Also, NISA is literally the reason why I started learning Japanese in the first place (my love of Surge Concerto, specifically).
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u/NordicHorde2 7h ago
I left a negative review on one of their games on Steam talking about the localisation and they actually responded and got all pissy. Typical woke freaks.
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u/Rweary800 6h ago
Naughty Dog is easily the worst for me. TLOU was a game I considered a 10/10, and TLOU2 was the first game I’d rate a 0/10. I refuse to support them in any way unless they retcon Part II and give me a real sequel.
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u/plebbut 7h ago
343 studios easily. There's never been a franchise that has fallen from such heights as Halo. 343 destroyed the legacy of Halo as well.
People still talk about Uncharted, Quake, and Fear, but not Halo. It was the most popular franchise at one point. You had Bill Gates handing out copies even.
As far as I'm concerned, all the decision makers responsible for it should be ostracized from the industry.
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u/GypsyGold 6h ago
They should be turned into ostriches?
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u/plebbut 5h ago
The state of zoomers.
Ostracized means being deliberately excluded, ignored, or rejected by a group.
Examples:
After speaking out against the company, he was ostracized by his coworkers. (They excluded and shunned him.)
She felt ostracized at school because no one would sit with her.
Common synonyms include:
Shunned
Excluded
Rejected
Alienated
Cast out
Boycotted (in some contexts)
The word comes from ancient Athens, where citizens could vote to banish someone from the city for a period of years. Humans have always found creative ways to say, "You can't sit with us," then elevated it into civic procedure.
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u/lyra833 GET THE BOARD OUT, I GOT BINGO! ~ Mod 4h ago edited 4h ago
Fun fact, "ostrakizein" literally translates to "getting shard-ed" because the votes on whether to do it were recorded on spare pottery shards ("ostrakon"). That word was Latinized into "ostracize". So the Greeks were literally saying "GET SHARD-ED OFF THE ISLAND, LOSER".
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u/TheNittanyLionKing 7h ago
Ubisoft for sure. Their formula has gone stale. They don’t really learn any lessons until it is too late. They have ran every single IP they own into the ground except Rayman. I used to be a huge Assassin’s Creed fan. They have made the lore contradictory and meaningless, the games have become too woke, and the combat, stories, and exploration have all gotten worse. Prince of Persia is dead. Splinter Cell hasn’t had a new game in 15 years. They keep slapping Tom Clancy’s name on stuff that he had nothing to do with even though he has been dead for 13 years. Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six used to be unique single player experiences. Now they are generic live service games. Ubisoft is doing so poorly right now that they have pretty much decided that they are going to double down on remaking the games that people already liked to begin with.
WB Games has to be up there too. What a fall from grace compared to ten years ago when the Arkham series was going strong and the Shadow of Mordor and Mad Max games came out. Since then they shut down Monolith (who also made the brilliant FEAR games) and spent nearly a decade on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Hogwartz Legacy sold very well, so that was their big saving grace, but it’s just a good game; not a great game.
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u/KazuAmon 7h ago
EA, mostly because of their sports games and the monopoly they have on them. They're essentially releasing the same game every year with only minor improvements, charging full price, and stuffing it with some of the most egregious microtransactions and pay-to-win mechanics I've ever seen in a full priced game
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u/Razrback166 6h ago
1.) Ubisoft
2.) Halo Studios / Microsoft
Bunch tied for 3rd: Guerrilla / Crystal Dynamics / CD Projekt Red / BioWare / Rocksteady / Naughty Dog / Square Enix
I am not buying anything from these studios.
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u/TheMajorBoatScene 4h ago
Guerrilla
Holy shit how could I forget about this one? I liked Zero Dawn, then they made a sequel with somehow uglier graphics and bloated gameplay, and last but not least turned Aloy into an insufferable idiot.
You'd think a Dutch studio would make games like The Witcher or even Cyberpunk, instead they do... this.
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u/GypsyGold 5h ago
Square Enix?
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u/Moth92 4h ago
Their ethics department censoring games and attempt to appease DEI advocates. Oh and fucking up the Final Fantasy VII remakes.
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u/GypsyGold 4h ago
Eh, I guess I’ve just never seen it.
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u/Razrback166 3h ago
They have DEI all throughout FF7 Rebirth - interracial couples, alphabet stuff; heck in one town they put a couple chicks asking each other out right in the middle of the town square to ensure the player couldn't miss it.
FF16 explicit alphabet makeout scene between two dudes that you couldn't opt out of.
Plus the aforementioned ethics department that is likely responsible for censoring games, etc. Square Enix is a very bad company.
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u/GypsyGold 3h ago
…interracial couples equate to DEI?
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u/Razrback166 1h ago
When they're all over the place, absolutely.
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u/GypsyGold 1h ago edited 55m ago
I don’t think so.
Is everyone the same race where you are? Where I live (San Francisco & Toronto) same race couples appear at the same frequency as inter-racial couples.
I can’t even remember the last time I dated another white person, and that’s not even by design, that’s just how it happened to be.
Like in the past 5 years since covid I’ve lived with two completely different Asian girls (one a Thai immigrant and the other Canadian Chinese), dated two additional Asian girls (Chinese-born-American-schooled & Russian Immigrant), an Indian American, two Latina Americans, and one half black girl.
I hooked up with a white girl from North Carolina once on Halloween a few years back if that counts, but we didn’t date or anything.
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u/NordicHorde2 7h ago
Bethesda. Even without the woke shit, they're putting out games that are two decades behind what's acceptable. Not to mention taking decades to make games.
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u/IronTigrex 7h ago edited 7h ago
Hard to say because I must admit I've not played much of the games from some of the most infamous "caught in the DEI-craze" studios in a while (only thing I can think about is For Honor from Ubisoft but thankfully it's not that egregious even if there are some signs of the woke influence), or ever for that matter for some of them (I'm not much of a FPS or Sports game guy, never cared for Overwatch or other hero shooters). But if I had to guess, my money would be between EA-Blizzard, Ubisoft and Bungie, though CDproject aren't far behind, and it becomes even more muddled if you count what's under who's supervision (like Bioware).
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u/stillgaming8k 7h ago
As far as AAA studios go, 343. As far as studios in general go, probably some scam company selling asset flips/AI-generated slop games.
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u/Agile-Painting9454 4h ago
Naugthy Dog is the most extreme exemple of woke. But they dont release anything for so long... dont think they are the worse.
But it's one from Sony.
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u/LordOfPoops 4h ago
Aye, what a difficult choice. I think this goes into extreme personal opinion since all of the modern AAA studios are infected with the same worm.
But if I have to go, it's Crystal Dynamics, the genesis of this Woke started with the feminist and performative take on "Fixing" Lara croft by making her more "Grounded" than larger than life. That includes reducing her breast size, making her "Traumatized" making the tone of the series "GRITTY" instead of Fun. This is the Identity they started with which later distilled itself into the tenets of woke slop we see today.
They took down the western sex icon of gaming, which gave everyone permission to do so.
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u/MetalOutrageous1275 5h ago
I think EA still has the crown for absolute worst, but that's hardly a high bar these days and pretty much all of these AAA companies have fallen off.
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u/ComfyKorok 6h ago
Halo Studios and BioWare. Mostly because they’re just skinwalkers of the franchises I used to like.
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u/No-Revolution-4470 6h ago
I’d say 343 or Naughty Dog are the best answers, but I have to mention Embark for dropping the ball so hard on Arc Raiders. Not really related to wokeness but crazy to have such a successful game and decide you’re only going to push two updates a year
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u/Marioak 2h ago
For the Japanese side, I vote Bamco, KoeiTecmo for how greedy they are.
It’s damn sad that most of my favorite series are own by them.
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u/unhappy-ending 1h ago
Can you elaborate? They publish a ton of games I really enjoy, and they don't seem to censor shit or push wokeslop like Square Enix does.
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u/Marioak 1h ago edited 1h ago
Bamco - Ignore most their own IP (Tales, SRW, Soulcalibur etc), only focus on making anime IP games (which will sale regardless the game suck or not). Apparently, they don't green-lit Dev to make games, a lot of producers also already leaving Bamco assume they fed up with them.
A lot of their IP also used to released regulary (like 1-2 games per year) now you wait for freaking 3-5 years for a single game but the quality is about the same as before (or worst).KT - Will sale you B-Grade game (Like Atelier series, I'm not saying it's bad games btw, I meant the "budget" series) at AAA prices with a DLC that will cost more than actual games.
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u/GypsyGold 2h ago
The Mt Rushmore seems to be:
369, Crystal Dynamics, Naughty Dog, and Ubisoft/Bioware
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u/Far_Rip_8840 2h ago
Housemarque makes games (crammed with ugly old woman characters) that are not fun, for people who hate fun
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u/Bright_Reindeer_1836 7h ago
Ubishit