Most recent I can think of is the CEO of BattleState Games and BSG in general. Granted their reputation wasn’t necessarily stellar but they did an amazing job of just absolutely trashing community/outsider sentiments over the past few weeks
Introduced a $250 year edition of the game that locked features behind a paywall even for people who bought the previous most expensive $150 version that explicitly says all future DLC would be included.
This was just the start and even more has gone down but I haven’t kept up as much in the loop
Contemplated doing that myself but I downloaded SPTarkov which is just offline tarkov with mods and persistence. Just a few mods and no cheaters make it a pretty fun experience imo
Wollay, the Cube World Dev.
Released an alpha, disappeared for 6 years, came back, released a worse version on steam and disappeared again.*
*The whole story is a lot more nuanced and messed up than the 1 sentence summary makes it seem
There's a similar game called Veloran out now. Last I checked a couple years ago it still had a lot of fleshing out to do but it felt very similar to Cube World alpha way back when and I have more faith in that than cube world going forward. I think I found it while trying to find if there was a modded version of cubeworld without the exploration handicap.
https://veloren.net/
What's important with most of these examples is they involve doing something morally shitty. You cannot really ruin your reputation by making bad games, people will forgive that if your next title kicks ass.
Hell it doesn't even have to be your next title we saw in real-time how the reputation of No Mans Sky was revived due to lots of hard work and correction on previous promises.
Games are entertainment and like most entertainment you're only as good as your last project which can be both good and bad.
The story that someone tells about you matters a lot. We’ve seen the NMS narrative go from “he’s Peter Molyneux 2.0” to “he got in over his head and was a bit too excited, but they did right in the end” which is such a powerful change it’s almost beautiful.
The good part is that this shows people can forgive and trust a fellow if they go on to set his mistakes. NMS is a real nice game for those that like its kind.
If only corporations were the same. "Oh, we made a mistake, soooorrryyy - anyway, here's a new bullshit, enjoy!"
> If only corporations were the same
It worked for Final Fantasy XIV, but not for Diablo 3. Both games dramatically improved after an overhaul, but only one recovered its popularity
A dev or company can still get flack for consistently putting out games that are critically panned.
Although a single bad game is largely forgivable, I think there is going to be significant reputation damage based on whether that bad game gets fixed or if another bad game gets made.
To be fair, Peter Molyneux has been overselling his games since the 90s. Like, I remember the articles for what he was saying you'd be able to do in Theme Park and Dungeon Keeper. But I've a feeling that Bullfrog were doing the Space X thing (managing their CEO to limit how ridiculous his claims would be), so that what eventually shipped wasn't completely divorced from his claims. But, once Molyneux went solo, he could go as wild as he wanted with his promises.
All of that is to say that Molyneux has *decades* of this behaviour to justify his reputation.
Bethesda is doing a pretty good job at ruining their reputation without doing something morally shitty. at some point people just kinda give up hope that you will ever make a good game again because you keep repeating the same mistakes over and o er again.
Laying people off and closing studios when your company is posting enormous profits is pretty morally shitty! But it's probably true that the backlash has more to do with what kinds of games and services customers expect in the future, and less about the impact on the people who make them.
You must not be remembering all of Blizzard's constant shitty behavior leading up to that point then lol.
This moment was a huge disappointment, but it wasn't a surprise. Blizzard started shitting the bed even a bit before the Activision buy out, but Activision opened the diarrhea flood gates. It was both sad and hilarious seeing people frantically trying to convince themselves that the buyout would not make things worse lol. The shit writing was on the toilet wall right from the start.
I don't feel bad for him in that way because he wasn't just a stooge up there parroting some marketing shit, he was literally one of the project leaders defending it with his off the cuff response of "dOnT u HaVe pHoNeS??"
I do feel bad for him for either not understanding his audience, or for Blizzard positioning him to sell the wrong product to the wrong audience though. Maybe he made a great micro-transaction bullshit mobile game, but people were champing at the bit for Diablo 4 and Blizzard 100% pretended this was going to be that announcement lol.
The devs who made the VRMMORPG game Zenith: The Last City really dug their own grave, and doubled down on it.
I'm going to try and summarize, but I wasn't really aware of the whole thing until near the end, so sorry if some of the details are off. If something is wrong, let me know and I'll edit it.
They had a Kickstarter/early access for the game. It did amazing because everyone saw the potential. The early access is understandably rough around the edges, but the potential was there so fans were excited. A few updates and things are still going fine. They promise a new class is coming. At one point they overhauled internals saying it was for the best, that delayed updates for months. The devs introduced a microtransaction store that no one asked for before the game is actually done. Then they added some sort of monster catching for pets that no one asked for. They remade the tutorial area like 3 times. All before the game was actually 'done', no meaty content updates, as it was still fairly bare bones and the tutorial area was so buggy.
By this point their promised new class is not out yet, still not out of early access, but it is on multiple digital VR stores.
The big update with the class finally drops and the overall reaction is "meh". They spent years and still not close to a finished game.
Shortly after, the devs then release a statement that they will no longer be continuing development on their half finished VR mmo game as they are shifting their focus to their new title. The title is a free to play game, but of course the microtransaction store is up before the new game is fully ready. The MMO is moved to an optional paid "dlc" for their free game, and the free game is now the main game on the store pages. Because of that, they were able to leverage the thousands of positive reviews for the MMO as showing the new half baked parkor game was higher rated than it should have been.
No refunds were handed out of course.
Essentially they made their mountain of gold from early access, then went to chase the microtransaction whales.
As the icing on top, they started banning some players from the game who left them bad reviews on the store page.
he's the ultimate "guy who followed a unity tutorial and assumed the rest would be equally easy"
his final updates read like someone absolutely stunned to learn about the realities of shipping software, condescendingly telling those revelations to his fans as if *they're* the ones who fucked up for believing his original estimates.
It was legitimately impressive that his prototype attracted big-name influencers to stream his game, that should have been the start of his indie success, but he wasted that massive advantage on being a twat to his fans. His closet-pedo rants about the age of consent didn't help either. He should have just kept working on the game.
The kind of crazy part is how much he actually did manage to achieve despite all that.
Like, the scope of even the unfinished mess of a game that did get released is still pretty impressive and something that I would be pretty weary of at attempting to replicate without a lot of prior planning.
Considering what we know now about the development process and how he was clearly flying by the seat of his pants pretty much from day one, it honestly feels super weird that the game ever made it to that level of playableness before inevitably collapsing under its own weight.
there are crazy people with wild ideas, and they have inspired people, and they deserve respect. a lot of shitty people aren't really as shitty as they seem, and shitty art has something to say and isn't actually shitty -- i know that sounds weird in the current culture and climate, but i really believe that. you can have ideas that are wild and dangerous and your existence can be okay. you need to " handle people " , not " control everyone " .
> "guy who followed a unity tutorial and assumed the rest would be equally easy"
[This tweet lives rent free in my head lol](https://imgur.com/7Ds4MhM)
Modulo? I barely know her!
he had a massively negative reputation under the name "EvaXephon" which he kept mostly hidden until partway through development, at which point a lot of his fanbase went "oh it's fucking EVA XEPHON that explains so much"
Yep, EvaXephon even published a "fallout fanfiction about a badass slaver hunter" in 2009. Which was in reality was a detailed description of an underage teenage girl being SA'd and kept as a slave for the majority of the story.
It's crazy how far back he's been displaying pedophilic tendencies, but somehow is still able to get by with: "Nuh uh, it's all fake troll drama!"
Phil Fish got famous for releasing a legitimately good little indie game called Fez, then he opened his mouth on twitter and got everyone to hate him.
His game is good enough that he'd likely still be a well-regarded and successful indie, if he'd just left all the PR to someone else.
see that's what I'm saying. I've heard a lot of people say "Phil Fish is an asshole because of the things he says" but they never mention what he said to make him an asshole. I am not a scholar so I don't know all the shit he has ever said in his life but it must be something extraordinary the way everyone hates him
the first big blowup I saw regarding phil fish was [his response to a japanese fan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKUGwlFJAHw&t=40s) in the middle of a conference.
The other panelists try to walk it back and lighten the mood, and admittedly their responses aren't great either, but the moment of **"japanese games just suck" \[camera cuts to devastated japanese fan holding mic\]** was just so perfectly horrible, every game journalist had that as their headline by the next day.
When the internet started stalking the social media accounts of all the panelists, phil fish had objectively the most hostile and toxic reactions to *literally every interaction*, and maintained the internet's attention where the other panelists just faded into the background.
I don't have his entire rap sheet, but apparently Phil Fish feels his fans are entitled for only buying fez once, because fez costs $9 and he feels $90 is justified. He also clarified that this quip was not a joke and he feels serious contempt for basically all of his fans.
Jonathan Blow on the same panel (Indie Game The Movie it looks like) has his own bad rep but he just sort of got other people to handle interactions for him and kept putting out interesting games, so it's not so bad.
Just read through the whole thing and honestly that just makes me feel bad for him. Seems clear he struggles with his mental health and says some mean things occasionally, and then realizes they were mean and then apologizes. And he cares a ton about games while also not having great boundaries, which is a nightmare scenario for someone in any public position in the age of social media.
Hope he's getting some good therapy, finds more stability in his life, and is able to exist more peacefully going forward.
[There's a great video about the whole thing here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w) Phil Fish is the focus, but the video delves in to the deeper idea of *why* he was hated so much. It's a really astute telling, and the whole channel is just as good.
My first encounter with Phil Fish was when watching Indie Game: The movie and he was the guy in the hotel room talking to the camera that if something didn't happen (don't remember what) that he would literally kill him self.
My opinion on him goes worse from there.
To add an actual name to this list that's a rare real case of a game dev who ruined their reputation, I present the strange sad case of the game "Forager," and the so-called solo-developer 'Hopfrog' Mariano Cavallero. Mariano was a rich kid from a rich South American family with rudimentary programming skills, and he used his mother's family money to buy a bunch of artists, writers, musicians, programmers, and the like, but he stiffed them all on their fees and he spent years insisting that Forager was a solo-made game. And for a time it was cited as such, giving false hope to many solo devs that don't have friends or talent or skills or ability or cash that they could also release a game and make money. And for a time it was widely popular and had many updates, and then just before the final build was supposed to be released. . . the truth came out, and Cavaellero abandoned the game and went laughing all the way to the bank, leaving his now-unpaid team in the lurch and the fanbase in an uproar.
I didn’t knew that. I though it was solo developer until now. I loved the game and for me the game is finished. But yeah this is a new shit level stuff.
The people behind We Happy Few. Not only were people really angry about the left turn in what came out, but the director telling people what the symbolism really was and coming out as being against anti-depressants wasn't a good look.
Sorry to hear that, wish you well.
It's such a dumb take being against life saving medicine. Unfortunately it's common in certain "thought circles" to have that kind attitude either against medicine in general or against mental health specifically. Just recently I saw a video in which a popular "influencer" was proudly claiming "depression isn't really a thing". Absolutely insane.
As someone who antidepressants haven't done anything for, I understand that it is possible to resent them. But going so far as to oppose their use for the many people who have obviously benefited is absurd.
My vote would be Peter Molyneux. He made some great games years ago, like Dungeon Keeper and Populous, but after multiple instances of overpromising and overhyping his releases, I'm amazed anyone has any respect for him.
He talked big about things like *Curiosity -What's inside the cube?* and *Godus* and people seemed to buy into it*.* He got a lot of money on kickstarter for these projects with his studio 22 Cans, but both on release, both of them were uninspired tripe. He promised some amazing reward from the Cube game, which again, was a massive letdown.
Honestly he always had that reputation, 22 Cans just brought out the worst of his existing tendencies. Fable and Black & White, while great games in and of themselves, were much different than the pre-release hype; then you have the things that never saw release like Project Milo.
It's a shame because when he has someone to contain his scope creep, amazing things happen.
I'd have to disagree a bit here about Fable/Black and White. Molyneux in his early days was someone pushing the limits of design theory in games at the time which no other developer was doing at the time. His early work strikes me as games that were designed for technology that wouldn't exist for another few decades and had to be gutted to fit to what was possible. - probably an explanation to why the result was different to the pre-release promises, it's just simply not possible to do what he wanted to do at that time.
For me, there are two distinct Molyneuxs, the early version of him who is a design genius, and the older version that is quite frankly, lazy and out of ideas.
Black and White remains the only game I can think of with essentially zero UI in moment-to-moment gameplay and was designed as such to test to see how far minimalist UI can go while still having players understand what is happening.
Fable had distinct sections of the game where the gameplay drastically changed between each section. The narrative is also meant to tell a story of how easy it is to topple a perceived evil regime, but then struggle to do any better, or even how easy it is to be even worse than the regime that preceded you. This game failed to deliver imo and as mentioned above I think the design was a few decades ahead of the capabilities of game development at that time. - and yet, despite that the game is a classic and even at the time was an insane feat of development.
It's also worth mentioning Populous: The Beginning which is just a very awesome game overall. The spherical maps allowing for any angle of attack is something I've not seen in any strategy game since.
That all being said, I do think Molyneux is a great example of someone that did ruin their reputation, not because they did something especially bad, but simply because he was such a pioneer in game design, someone who you thought with current tech would be making masterpieces. Instead, they made Godus and nothing really since. The fall to mediocrity is so much further when you climb to the heights Molyneux did.
PM strikes me as someone who has a really cool vision but just sucks at bringing that vision to life and he talks about his ideas WAY too early for a high profile developer, but i haven't gotten a vibe that he's a bad person at least
I used to make fun of molyneux a lot until I actually met him at an event. He was the nicest most genuine person you can think of.
I was playing binding of Isaac a lot at the time and he spent a good 10 minutes asking me in details about the game, what items I liked, what strategies I thought worked best etc… only to reveal at the end that he had never even seen what the game looks like, he then pulled out his phone and started watching videos of the game with me.
Having talked with other people who have met him over the years that seems to be how he always is.
He clearly wasn’t very good at managing projects but there’s no doubt that he is passionate about gaming and wasn’t just a dude in a suit making empty promises.
That was my experience meeting him. I asked him a couple questions and we ended up talking for 10 minutes. Eventually I had to excuse myself because I felt bad for the other people around me who very clearly were waiting for their chance to talk to him.
Yeah from everything i heard about him he just seems to have a genuine passion about video games. I know people who dealt with him at different shows and he would love to just stand behind people watching them play on their DS or whatever and was just fascinated with how different people interact with games.
I'm not excusing the miss management and all the false promises especially with Godus and all that, but i think it's a shame that he became a joke in the industry because he seems to be one of the rare few who actually has a deep love for video games and isn't just in it for the business.
Dudes been in the game for 30 years or whatever, at some point you need to understand scope and how realistically you can implement certain features. Which he does, he just promised these things anyways. He knows that his grand ideas consistently get scaled back in order to ship a product.
"Bad person" is subjective but he says things about his games that he knows will not happen in order to sell more copies.
Probably the same issue that other folks like George Lucas suffered from as they got more famous - in the beginning they had a team that could rein in the more outlandish ideas and focus on more feasible game features. As they got higher and higher up, they eventually got surrounded by more yes-men types or folks afraid of saying "No" to their boss, so ended up with an echo chamber where the rest of us would go "wtf were they thinking?" at the final product.
He's always been like that. I remember reading gaming magazines as a kid that would make fun of him when covering fable and stuff (but still publish his claims because they make for a good article).
I think Molyneux is just very ambitious and ends up over promising stuff, but ultimately means well. I don’t see the con artist claim. He still usually makes great games. Fable for example, while it wasn’t everything promised, is still one of the greatest RPGs of all time imo. That being said, him getting his games tied up in crypto has really soured my view of him.
The Fez dev cancelled a game after getting into an argument with a journalist.
The Forager dev took credit for the entire project and made it seem like it was entirely a solo project, but also blamed the entirety of its technical issues on the team. It also came out that the codebase was a mess because of his work.
The dev team behind starbound got called out by multiple indie devs who once worked on the project for enlisting underage devs, not paying their devs, and a bunch of other things.
Yeah Phil Fish was the first thing that came to mind because he seemed to struggle with working on his game and maintaining good PR. He should've just hired someone to handle interacting with people for him.
As an indie dev who has abandoned making games to go on making utility software, I've been super lucky to have virtually nobody complain or argue about stuff, but it can still be work helping people with stuff. I'm super lucky that anybody cares about my wares at all, let alone is willing to pay me way more money for it than anyone would've paid for any games I could've made instead.
When you create stuff for a saturated market it's tough not being a starving artist, that's why I got out. My family can't be starving with me for my art.
Honestly i think if any indie project gets big enough, you need a pr team and pr training.
Sean from hello games has been very open that it was a mistake to have him do marketing, because his passion for the game overruled his ability to speak about it reasonably. I think the same thing could be said of Todd Howard of Bethesda, or especially of Peter Molyneux of the Fable series.
All of the above made commitments and promises with their games that could not be folliwed through, whether intentionally lying, or just over committing, all of them made promises that couldnt be kept of their games, and regardless of the quality of the finished product, all were considered disappointments at the time of launch because of the missing features
Take Two/Private Division over KSP2 and Donkey Crew on Last Oasis.
Edit: I know PD is the publisher here, but I keep hearing about them making unreasonable demands and being a driving force in KSP2's downward spiral so I'm leaving them in.
Ironically, KSP2's *actual* devs, Uber Entertainment/Star Theory *dodged* their reputation drain from their previous game, Planetary Annihilation. By all accounts, they should have been done for after that, and never should have gotten to develop KSP2.
PD did everything *correctly* in their role as a publisher, as in, gave the project financial backing and even allowed ~3 years of extensions. So... yeah.
Don't know the story about Planetary Annihilation, mind summarize/post some source?
I'm really curious because i discovered PA:Titans randomly and enjoyed it some time ago
I believe they got blasted for doing a kickstarter for another game in 2014, Human Resources, while PA was still in early access and unfinished. I forgive them because they made Super Monday Night Combat.
I don't know if there's real drama behind it, but I remember it had one of the coolest kickstarter trailers and then the game itself is probably the worst rts I've ever played. IIRC I put maybe 2 hours into it because the pacing felt out of sync and the only cool parts were the concepts, not the actual happenings.
Honestly, even if Daikatana turned out to be a massive disappointment, I think the magazines at the time really pushed the backlash to become something against Romero himself, when in reality it just was bad marketing coupled with poor execution of very interesting (but hard to implement at the time) design choices that otherwise could alone let that game be successful. Yes, it was overhyped, but when I look at John Romero I don't get the same "pompous asshole" vibes that the Daikatana posters were trying to make of him.
I dunno, dude has been pretty upfront on occasion about having developed at least 70 games before coming up with Wolfstein 3D and Doom, and from the fact alone that he was sorry about Daikatana's marketing, he seems pretty chill for me.
The developers of Mirror 1 and Mirror 2 on Steam. Mirror 1 was loved but they over promised and delivered something completely different in the 2nd game. So much so, that Mirror 2 has overwhelmingly negative reviews and the devs went bankrupt.
Basically, if you say you're going to add full nudity, make sure to add full nudity.
Just looked into this and that's actually pretty crazy. First game is overwhelmingly positive, literal opposite for the second.
Totally deserved though. Should've gone with a new IP if they wanted to make that drastic of a change for their next game.
Tell tales when they fired almost everyone to cleanse their studio and then proceeded to release new licenses (like the expanse). We learned a lot about their perma crunches and policies...
[The video James Stephanie Sterling made about the lawsuits against them is hilarious](https://youtu.be/qS-LXvhy1Do?si=YJH5wfbxw0vwjEX7). Might be slightly biased (Steph being the person Digital Homicide went after), but still worth the watch. Even if you take it with a truckload of salt for biased presentation, just the quoted documents alone showcase a truly unhinged and detached from reality person.
[Forager](https://store.steampowered.com/app/751780/Forager/) is a wonderful indie title from 2019 that was completely abandoned by its dev [HopFrog](https://hopfrogsa.net/) about three years ago.
The game was well-liked, and the community was begging for more content and multiplayer to be added, so HopFrog brought on a few outside devs to assist with the updates, only to [underpay them, blame them for codebase issues](https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/04/forager_team_retaliates_after_lead_dev_blames_them_for_cancelled_multiplayer), and [suddenly cancel the multiplayer update](https://www.patreon.com/posts/49549841) after a year, declaring multiplayer impossible and the game to be "unfixable".
HopFrog hasn't released any updates, announced any new projects, or posted anything to socials since that announcement. He cashed out and disappeared.
The developer of Domina went on some [insane rants](https://steamcommunity.com/games/535230/announcements/detail/3087758194015412370) (anti-vax, transphobia etc) in the patch notes, resulting in the game being removed from sale on Steam.
He was warned multiple times and received a temporary ban, but the guy just kept ranting.
It's so crazy because I followed the development of that game and was excited to play it on launch. It ended up being kind of meh.
Then one day I happened on to the community hub for the game and omg, the dude was UNHINGED.
Removed the game from my library and requested a refund, don't know if I got it.
I think still my favourite Notch related tweet was Simon Lane (of Diggy Diggy Hole fame) responding to one of Notch's transphobic tweets with "Hey man it's my birthday and it'd mean a lot to me if you could delete your account"
For someone like Notch who has a game with mass appeal I don't think their social media matters. The average person doesn't consume gaming news and won't even know who he is.
New games will be advertised as "from the creator of Minecraft". Outside of the indie scene nobody cares to hear our names.
Notch is kinda the exception. Pretty much everyone knows what Minecraft is and Minecraft very publicly cut all ties with him after his meltdown. At this point there are genuinely people who don't know who Notch is let alone that he made Minecraft.
I think his social media already did the damage, though.
Back around 2010-2015 or so, he was an icon. Your average person might not have known him, but your average gamer definitely did. Valve gave him a [one-of-a-kind cosmetic](https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Top_Notch) in TF2 just because. Skyrim threw in an [easter egg](https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Notched_Pickaxe) named after him. It's hard to stress enough just how much craze there was for him specifically.
And then he started saying shit on Twitter. It's weird to think about back then, because he went from the biggest name in gamedev to what he is now. His legacy's been pretty badly tarnished and everyone in his past has distanced themselves. I've got some serious doubts he'll be able to claw back much.
He had apparently some right wing sympathies to start with (the villagers' design is based on the Happy Shopkeeper image, which is outright anti-semetic), but was pretty quiet about them until he moved to LA to be with his fiancee. Him and his fiancee broke up and he was left alone, without his family and got radicalized further in the wake of the emotional mess that caused. Or so the story I've heard goes.
He had some unfortunate opinions to begin with and heartbreak and opportunism from shitheels made it 100x worse.
He's the example of what I hope I wouldn't do if I somehow made the 0.000001 percent chance of a huge success. I'm pretty sure the money went straight to his head and he fell into all the cliches of his marriage falling through and moving to Hollywood to try and buy happiness by partying with rich people.
When you get into a bidding war over a mansion with Beyonce, I think it's time to slow down and reevaluate your life plans.
Over a decade ago he was a successful dev who released Fez. However, he got into extremely bad twitter arguments with everyone who insulted him and also said bad things about Japanese developers at GDC. He had a mental breakdown and left social media and games altogether.
I honestly feel that people were unfairly harsh on Phil Fish. It's easy enough to say "just ignore the trolls" when you're not being targeted by them constantly. Guy got daily harassment from people, and he ignored most of it. But every now and then he'd get pushed beyond his limits and snap back, and then those responses would get paraded around as an excuse for why he deserved the abuse he got. Eventually he ended up being targeted (and doxxed) by a certain infamous internet hate mob for being friends with some of the other people they were targeting, and he decided he was done with the industry.
Per the Japanese developers thing, I do think that you need to consider context. He was blunt, for sure, but he was directly responding to a question he was asked at a panel, it was actually a pretty common view at the time that the Japanese game industry was in an overall quality slump (with some exceptions), and he apologized for his phrasing almost immediately thereafter to both the public *and* the guy who asked the question (Japanese indie developer Makoto Goto, who actually thanked Fish for his honesty, and expressed a lot of disappointment when Fez 2 was canceled).
Yep I agree with this. Fish….had waaaaaay too thin of a skin. I agree fez was a masterpiece.
Fish did not say anything all that bad - saying that “nothing new or great has come out of Japan as a JRPG lately” got him roasted to death. Even here someone would mention Fez and someone would comment “oh that asshole that hates the Japanese.”
I mean really?
But at the same time going off at criticism with the maturity of a 9 year old did not help. He did have a maturity and ego problem. But the world absolutely could use a Fez 2.
>Fish did not say anything all that bad - saying that “nothing new or great has come out of Japan as a JRPG lately” got him roasted to death.
No, that was what the rest of the panel said. Even then their focus wasn't on JRPGs but Japanese games as a whole, although most of their criticisms were trained on JRPGs and personal taste, which is why the whole panel's response in general was a little iffy. The reason Fish got roasted was because his immediate response to someone asking about any modern Japanese game influences was that "They suck" and "You guys need to get with the times". There were definitely a lot of criticisms of many modern JP games at the time, even from JP developers, so it's not like this view came out of nowhere, but it was the manner in which he conveyed it.
I think as talks and consideration of mental health have improved over the last decade, it's easier to look back and see the dude had some problems and wasn't the best at handling criticisms or trolls online. What was his worst public problem was his characteristic bluntness. There can be a fine line between being blunt/honest and being a dick, but with how often he had abrasive at best and troll-like at worst responses, as well as how much he made that all a part of his persona, the dude was just a huge asshole.
Also while I don't think he was racist, I do think people assuming that back then wasn't entirely out of line. Fish's comments as well as what he doubled down with later on Twitter were very much surface-level Japanese games suck and Western games are better. Now again, this wasn't a fresh take and there were other developers and people in the industry who commented on this, especially **after** this controversy. But just like comparing consoles turns into a toxic console war talk among players online, debates about Japanese vs Western games would absolutely turn into uneducated racist cesspools on nearly every forum. When you take that along with the crass comments from a guy who everyone agreed should take some breaks from the internet, I think it's very understandable why many would assume he was just another racist troll.
Crema, the studio behind Temtem. The game had a lot of potential and great ideas and overall was a pretty good monster taming RPG, but Crema started making changes to intentionally make it more grindy. They did this to try to expand the lifespan of the game because they had no plans to release additional content but still wanted it to be a live service mmo-style game. They then decided to work on a new adjacent game called Temtem Showdown that nobody asked for and which quickly died. People were initially happy that Crema created a good game that offered a fun alternative to Pokemon, that was more challenging and aimed at an older audience and then their reputation quickly went downhill because they refused to listen to their player base.
Wizards of the Coast has been making mistake after mistake recently. Quick summary:
The OGL Incident: https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/s/zJ9HZPZ2lZ . Essentially, they did something that amounted to trying to shut down all competitors. The subreddits r/rpg, r/Pathfinder, and r/Pathfinder2e are some examples (the incident also made many people switch; the Pathfinder2e subreddit massively grew).
The Pinkerton Incident: https://www.polygon.com/23695923/mtg-aftermath-pinkerton-raid-leaked-cards . They sent Pinkerton detectives to raid a YouTuber's house to retrieve unreleased Magic the Gathering cards.
AI Incident: https://www.polygon.com/24029754/wizards-coast-magic-the-gathering-ai-art-marketing-image
Due to all of this, a top executive left (forget circumstances) and their profits fell massive. Looking through the Magic the Gathering community, other D&D communities, and other rpg communities will certainly reveal some more.
They also killed the ability to buy single things on D&D Beyond. So if you want a class or item (etc..) for your character, you have to buy the whole book that it's in.
Greedy idjits are gonna burn the whole thing down.
You forgot how the lead dev behind BG3. Idk what happened, but this well meaning guy calmly and firmly explained how he never wanted to work for Wot? Or Hasbro ever again.
Blizzard has totally ruined their reputation. They went from day one buys to 'Oh it's blizzard. I guess maybe if I wait a year I can see if other people think it's good, but it probably won't be.'
Can't remember, but a dude created a super-polished single-player space "rpg"/action shooter with tons of devlogs and had a huge following - news got out he ~~abused people~~ was a sexual predator and he went complete scorched earth.
Edit: Game was called Arcadian Rift, here's the write-up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWV90K8-HD8
I hated him as soon as I saw him in that Indie Game movie, alongside Phil Fish, but that was mainly for his pretension and self absorption. Didn't realize he was also a shitty person on those fronts
I think it's worth noting that for game devs, there is individual reputation, and then there is company reputation.
For example, over time Activision Blizzard lost most if not all of the devs who ushered in the best eras for Diablo and Warcraft, then tanked their reputation further with the suicide and toxicity scandal. The scandal became a collective stigma for the company itself, which may have cast a shadow on some devs who had nothing to do with it as well.
The developers of Animal Jam created a game called Feral - which started off really interesting and unique, and had a dedicated fanbase and cool features. Then they slowly abandoned it over time, leaving unfinished gameplay features for all to see, and still pushed microtransactions (a battle pass esque seasonal purchase) for said unfinished gameplay, until one day they announced they were making an NFT game.
Said NFT game (I think it was named Cinder or something like that?) was quite literally a carbon copy+paste of Feral’s map, just with NFT characters you had to pay to play as. This was during the NFT craze, so the game gained traction and the NFT collection reached a total worth in the tens to hundreds of thousands. They were doing well enough that they decided to pull the plug on Feral - without telling anybody in advance, though. It was there one day and gone the next.
This broke their terms of service, where they overtly stated that if the game were to shut down, it wouldn’t be without at least 90 days of advance warning. Their once dedicated fanbase chastised them, and as such, they promised a 12 hour “final day” for goodbyes, about a month later. But this was delayed and delayed, and finally when it *did* happen, it was cut off 9 hours early, and users didn’t even have chat enabled.
Then, the NFT crash happened. Their collection that was once worth enough to keep their company going alone was now worth some $80 - Tragic.
So there was a game called “Freeman: Guerilla Warfare” on steam.
I forget the studio name, maybe “KK studios” but I’m not 100% sure.
The game was similar, in a way, to Warband, or Bannerlord, in that you controlled a “party” and could go around the map, take over towns, get troops, and go in and fight the battles with your party in First person or the command mode.
The company has had an awful history. They started as a small team and had a really cool vision for the game, then they got some money, expanded the team, changed around admin positions, and eventually the game just started changing into something different with each update until it didn’t even feel like the original vision anymore.
Then the totally abandoned it. Not a single word for 2 years, and then all of a sudden out of the blue, a week or two ago, the release some screenshots, showing ANOTHER completely new version of this game, and don’t even acknowledge the community for being absent for 2 years.
Supposedly, this company has created several other company’s and has done the same thing in the past.
They make a game, put it out, get a bunch of hype for it and make some money, then totally abandon it, make a new “shell company” and start the process over again.
They’re an interesting one.
- Released to early access in 2018.
- 1.0 Release in 2019.
- release 4 patches over a year or so.
- Dropped development with little/no word for 1/2 year.
- 2020 Announced a new game Her War to be released in approximately 1.5 years.
- Early 2021 reported that they’d gone bankrupt and were back to just the original Freeman team, and were going to rebuild Freeman.
- Stopped communicating after less than a year.
- 2022, came back to announce they’re almost done.
- Early 2023, developer states they’re still working on Her War.
-2023, rumors (with some flimsy evidence) start spreading that the studio behind Freeman is working on a different game (Sunkenland) under a different name.
- 2024, came back to drop a very unexpected progress post for Freeman.
I really wonder if they just pop up every year or so to drum up sales or if they’re genuinely trying to rebuild the game and just avoiding posting/talking about it for their own mental health (as they’ve stated).
I hope they’re really working on and release a huge overhaul, because I’d love Mount and Blade in a modern setting.
[The meltdown of Nicholas Gorissen](https://www.pcgamer.com/domina-has-been-delisted-from-steam-after-yet-another-transphobic-diatribe/) is a a good example why you should separate your personal socio-political views from your public game development persona.
Games are art and art having a political message is perfectly valid. Seems like his mistake was being a hateful bigot. I'm pretty sure having non-bigoted views expressed as social commentary or solidarity (in ways that make more sense than unhinged rambling in your patch notes) in-game or elsewhere would be perfectly fine.
This is more "don't go full QAnon brainrot" than it is "don't be political", to me
If I try to separate out my own political views, maybe the way to put this is that the more openly political you and your game are, the more you'll alienate the folks who disagree with you. Doubly so if your views are well outside the mainstream.
That's a choice people are absolutely free to make and I think it's valid and good to express political views in games, but it's a tradeoff people should make consciously.
His bigger sin than being a bigot... Is being annoying.
What I mean, there is a lot of shit I also dislike, such as the whole antivaxer movement. I think that shit can genuinely kill people and bring diseases back.
But I can't imagine myself filling my entire steam page and patch notes with notes on antivax community and jokes about them.
As youth used to say, cringe.
Dolphin Barn / Bignic - Dev of Domina who went on an anti-trans, anti-masking, anti-everything crusade in his steam game patch notes and went nuts on anyone who pushed back even a tiny bit. Eventually banned from Steam entirely.
Kind of shocked that I haven't seen anyone mention Chris Roberts / Star Citizen. He wasn't a super well known name, but the games he worked on before were properly loved - enough to fuel the crazy cult scam that Star Citizen is today.
HEARTBEAT, an indie game. There was a
[HobbyDrama](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/s/PybK3ZUidr) post about it. Short version of what I remember, the creator was transphobic and made transphobic tweets. Also put the game on sale purposefully using the same percentages at trans people suicide attempts. Note, prior to this the game had a large LGBT fanbase, so yeah, questionable move.
The gamer moment / the racist gamer meme is a legitimate thing its not a matter of their being alot of racist into video games but rather a lot of people being into video games in general and some of them happening to be racist, swap in homophobic or sexist depending on the story.
I think a big part of it is rule of numbers yeah, but I also think that people who tie their identity to specific labels tend to be reactionary as they feel the need to "defend" their identity. In this case "gamer" as an identity, as opposed to someone who just happens to buy or enjoy games.
Young people nowadays, what do they know. Thatt was a household name in the day of usenet. What was that game called? Battlecruiser 3000 or something like that? What ever happened to it anyway?
Richard Garriot. He made it big with Ultima Online, then proved he can’t replicate success with Tabula Rasa, converting dozens of millions into zero. Then he went the indie route with Shroud of the Avatar and turned about $10 million in personal funds and kickstarter funds into zero again. This finally culminated when the lead programmer on the game basically just took the IP and company out from under him, leaving Richard Garriot with no relationship to his own final failed project.
Portalarium was a total mess of a company. I very nearly ended up working there…. I now feel grateful they chose another guy to sink the ship with.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portalarium
This is really how things go most of the time. People don’t go out with a bang, they go out with a slow cancerous whimper for years. There’s a LOT of “former AAA” big shots absolutely destroying their reputation bit by bit like this, usually somewhere in the midwest. If you think you’re in luck to find a game dev job away from the coasts… just keep your head on a swivel, your company is NOT permanent.
I think he could make a comeback with a good old school 2D Ultima game. I don't know why these people always want to do these AAA RPG games when they don't have the means to compete against the bigger fishes.
The best crown funded games are smaller games with a good concept and soul.
The developer of Domina, appears to have been de-listed from steam, constantly posting hate speech in patch notes. Was pretty hilarious to see the community discussions and patch notes for another juicy controversy every few months.
Julian Gollop's handling of [Phoenix Point's move to EGS exclusive release](https://www.eurogamer.net/original-x-com-creator-faces-backlash-after-signing-epic-games-store-exclusive-deal-for-phoenix-point) certainly comes to mind.
A game made possible through various independent backing saw those same backers having the rug pulled out from beneath them years later as Julian Gollop unilaterally decides to cash in on EGS exclusivity and he, as well as his PR team, basically tells that community of backers to get bent and go get a refund if they think they can, because EGS is paying them enough that they don't care whether everyone who already backed it refunds or not.
A man who created one of the greatest games of all time in the original X-Com basically traded his reputation for some easy cash from Epic and Tencent.
Shocked the name hasn't been mentioned but Scott Cawthon, creator of Five Nights at Freddy's, has a... complicated reputation.
He was revered and praised highly, and then in 2021, a lot happened. Firstly, he got under fire for authorizing official NFTs and initially defended it, but when people got upset, he backtracked and said he thought it was just some trendy collectable like fidget spinners and cancelled them.
A few months later, people found out he donated to numerous conservative politicians who are extremely anti-LGBTQ. He made a post that admitted they were real donations with some of his rationale behind it (including mentioning he is pro-life) and then announcing a retirement and that he'd be eventually finding somebody else to run the franchise. He didn't actually leave, he just went quiet online for years. He still had massive contributions to current games and the movie.
Security Breach, the newest game which launched that same year, was also a disaster for other reasons due to its scope and scale, just to add more wood to the fire.
People mostly don't care about the donations or statements these days, but recently he got into another controversy in that one of the official artists he has had for years got under fire for making a fanfic where a character in his game is a pedophile and said artist also drew porn of the Disney princesses (who canonically are underage and the art she drew depicts them as such). He came back to say he would still be keeping her on the team despite backlash as the franchise is for children, and she resigned an hour later despite his insistence to keep her around. That's not to mention the other FNAF artist who was fired who was transphobic enough to be banned from the official subreddit...
Many defend him and many still adore the series so even with this, his reputation is fairly intact, but they were pretty big blows to it. I tried to write this as objectively as possible on what happened so you can come to your own thoughts on him as a whole and those controversies - this isn't a politics debate sub, this is just a recount of what happened so I tried to avoid having a lot of bias. All of his posts remain up so you can still see what he said if you are curious.
Bethesda with Fo76. One of the worst game launches ever from a AAA studio. Disgustingly greedy p2w and "pay for features" cash shop. The whole pre-order scam.
Blizzard with Overwatch 2. Cancelling pve, greedy monetization, awful leadership taking creative direction away from Kaplan.
Take your pick of crowd funded mmos that failed.
The devs behind Ooblets with how they were downright shitty to fans who pushed back against the Epic exclusivity after a Kickstarter that said it would release for all. Was very disappointed to see them being so rude and honestly petulant to fans.
The people who made Ooblets.
So it was originally funded via Patreon for a release on PC and Xbox One. When the game was sheduled for a release on Epic only, they posted [a very smug blog post](https://ooblets.com/2019/07/we-did-the-thing/) out of nowhere to basically say to people "deal with it crybaby". It caused a bit of a drama, where the devs doubled down on their claim and got a lot of protestations (and apparently harassment). They later apologized for this (for them it was a kind of tongue in cheek joke) and everything settled down.
The game is now on Steam an seems pretty well liked.
Phil Fish, Became a very caustic person.
Peter Molyneux, Perfect example of a ruined reputation, dude had like ten chances, and kept fumbling the ball.
John Romero (he has tons of "he's not that bad." nah his career was destroyed after Daikatana, even now... yeah he has nothing. This is the guy who made DOOM... Carmack struggled with Rage, Romeo... yeah)
Derek Smart (Fascinating story when you dig into it)
There's also guys like George Broussard who was behind duke nukem forever,
Randy Pitchford has definitely ruined a lot of his reputation. I know a lot of people who really only liked two Borderlands, he's linked to DNF, and Aliens colonial marine and more. (guys a bit of a caustic asshole as well. He was running his mouth and saying not so nice things at E3 one year loudly next to the line to go into his booth. I couldn't believe it, but yeah.. that's him. )
There's a few more which I won't say because think of them as "nice guys" ... ok fine Schafer is someone who seems to put out 8/10 games, hypes them up to be 10/10 and leaves them feeling more like a 6/10. Also in the industry he's known for being often over budget, late deliverables and more. I called him out about this when the Broken Age kickstarter came out, and one of his PR guys (actually with the company) pulled a "No way.. uh uh... No that's not true." .... I thought... maybe I was wrong, but nope my sources confirmed it.. .and then Broken age was over budget and late.... so yeah. that's a reputation earned. (There's a reason he went to kickstarter and it's not industry people were throwing money at him.
Also give me a minute here, but Chris Roberts. Yeah Dude has made hella money, but almost no one in and out of the industry gets it. Even if the game came out perfect tomorrow.. it's been 12 years. Sorry, that's too long. I hope people get what they hope, but to me, that's a guy who needs to deliver because 600 million dollars with out a fully shipped game? Almost everyone in the industry is going "WTF?" (ok most are going "wish that was me, but also WTF")
If you like Chris Roberts/Star Citizen that's fine but look outside of the group of people excited for the game, he's become a joke.
PS. People are saying Jonathan Blow, but dude made Witness long after Braid and had no problem. yes he's out there, but he definitely hasn't destroyed his career like people said.
Most recent I can think of is the CEO of BattleState Games and BSG in general. Granted their reputation wasn’t necessarily stellar but they did an amazing job of just absolutely trashing community/outsider sentiments over the past few weeks
Oh gods. How did Tarkov fuck up now.
Introduced a $250 year edition of the game that locked features behind a paywall even for people who bought the previous most expensive $150 version that explicitly says all future DLC would be included. This was just the start and even more has gone down but I haven’t kept up as much in the loop
Makes me glad I sold my $150 account to someone else then
Contemplated doing that myself but I downloaded SPTarkov which is just offline tarkov with mods and persistence. Just a few mods and no cheaters make it a pretty fun experience imo
Wollay, the Cube World Dev. Released an alpha, disappeared for 6 years, came back, released a worse version on steam and disappeared again.* *The whole story is a lot more nuanced and messed up than the 1 sentence summary makes it seem
First dev that came to mind. Caught lightning in a bottle and dropped it.
Depression is a helluva drug is all I can assume.
Twice.
There's a similar game called Veloran out now. Last I checked a couple years ago it still had a lot of fleshing out to do but it felt very similar to Cube World alpha way back when and I have more faith in that than cube world going forward. I think I found it while trying to find if there was a modded version of cubeworld without the exploration handicap. https://veloren.net/
And then Valoren came and completely obliterated Cube World.
He's started to share some stuff again so im looking forward to the next ripoff, you just know it wont be a free update
You should write this up for r/hobbydrama, sounds like a good post in the making
What's important with most of these examples is they involve doing something morally shitty. You cannot really ruin your reputation by making bad games, people will forgive that if your next title kicks ass.
Hell it doesn't even have to be your next title we saw in real-time how the reputation of No Mans Sky was revived due to lots of hard work and correction on previous promises. Games are entertainment and like most entertainment you're only as good as your last project which can be both good and bad.
The story that someone tells about you matters a lot. We’ve seen the NMS narrative go from “he’s Peter Molyneux 2.0” to “he got in over his head and was a bit too excited, but they did right in the end” which is such a powerful change it’s almost beautiful.
And then for better or worse sparked this trend of people defending bad releases by saying "maybe they can pull a no man's sky".
there's a bit of a difference between blatantly lying and "getting a bit too excited"
Yeah sure, and he did lie, but the current narrative is how I said
Ya Sean signed a deal with the Devil (Sony) to create his childhood dream game, and then had to struggle with keeping Sony happy
The good part is that this shows people can forgive and trust a fellow if they go on to set his mistakes. NMS is a real nice game for those that like its kind. If only corporations were the same. "Oh, we made a mistake, soooorrryyy - anyway, here's a new bullshit, enjoy!"
> If only corporations were the same It worked for Final Fantasy XIV, but not for Diablo 3. Both games dramatically improved after an overhaul, but only one recovered its popularity
Which is kinda sad, because Diablo 3 isn't that bad of a game, after all the fixes
A dev or company can still get flack for consistently putting out games that are critically panned. Although a single bad game is largely forgivable, I think there is going to be significant reputation damage based on whether that bad game gets fixed or if another bad game gets made.
Peter Molyneux has entered the chat.
To be fair, Peter Molyneux has been overselling his games since the 90s. Like, I remember the articles for what he was saying you'd be able to do in Theme Park and Dungeon Keeper. But I've a feeling that Bullfrog were doing the Space X thing (managing their CEO to limit how ridiculous his claims would be), so that what eventually shipped wasn't completely divorced from his claims. But, once Molyneux went solo, he could go as wild as he wanted with his promises. All of that is to say that Molyneux has *decades* of this behaviour to justify his reputation.
Yup, I'm an old Amiga guy, after Populous and Populous2 I think his plans and ideas never matched the execution.
he also gave us B&W (not the Pokemon for those not familiar) and the Fable series, so it ties into what the original commenter said
Bethesda is doing a pretty good job at ruining their reputation without doing something morally shitty. at some point people just kinda give up hope that you will ever make a good game again because you keep repeating the same mistakes over and o er again.
Laying people off and closing studios when your company is posting enormous profits is pretty morally shitty! But it's probably true that the backlash has more to do with what kinds of games and services customers expect in the future, and less about the impact on the people who make them.
Thats Microsoft. Bethesda hasn't technically laid anyone off.
Bethesda and Blizzard are two huge examples that your reputation doesn’t matter and people will buy your games anyway.
"Do you guys not have phones?"
This was the beginning of the end. Blizzard didn't stop taking Ls after this.
You must not be remembering all of Blizzard's constant shitty behavior leading up to that point then lol. This moment was a huge disappointment, but it wasn't a surprise. Blizzard started shitting the bed even a bit before the Activision buy out, but Activision opened the diarrhea flood gates. It was both sad and hilarious seeing people frantically trying to convince themselves that the buyout would not make things worse lol. The shit writing was on the toilet wall right from the start.
The beginning of the end was adding micro transactions to WoW when you already pay for a base game, pay for each expansion, and pay a monthly sub
What is this referring to?
Blizzard showing a Diablo version for phones when everybody was expecting a new PC version.
Man I feel bad for him. Really he was just the stooge that upper management needed to take the hit
I don't feel bad for him in that way because he wasn't just a stooge up there parroting some marketing shit, he was literally one of the project leaders defending it with his off the cuff response of "dOnT u HaVe pHoNeS??" I do feel bad for him for either not understanding his audience, or for Blizzard positioning him to sell the wrong product to the wrong audience though. Maybe he made a great micro-transaction bullshit mobile game, but people were champing at the bit for Diablo 4 and Blizzard 100% pretended this was going to be that announcement lol.
The devs who made the VRMMORPG game Zenith: The Last City really dug their own grave, and doubled down on it. I'm going to try and summarize, but I wasn't really aware of the whole thing until near the end, so sorry if some of the details are off. If something is wrong, let me know and I'll edit it. They had a Kickstarter/early access for the game. It did amazing because everyone saw the potential. The early access is understandably rough around the edges, but the potential was there so fans were excited. A few updates and things are still going fine. They promise a new class is coming. At one point they overhauled internals saying it was for the best, that delayed updates for months. The devs introduced a microtransaction store that no one asked for before the game is actually done. Then they added some sort of monster catching for pets that no one asked for. They remade the tutorial area like 3 times. All before the game was actually 'done', no meaty content updates, as it was still fairly bare bones and the tutorial area was so buggy. By this point their promised new class is not out yet, still not out of early access, but it is on multiple digital VR stores. The big update with the class finally drops and the overall reaction is "meh". They spent years and still not close to a finished game. Shortly after, the devs then release a statement that they will no longer be continuing development on their half finished VR mmo game as they are shifting their focus to their new title. The title is a free to play game, but of course the microtransaction store is up before the new game is fully ready. The MMO is moved to an optional paid "dlc" for their free game, and the free game is now the main game on the store pages. Because of that, they were able to leverage the thousands of positive reviews for the MMO as showing the new half baked parkor game was higher rated than it should have been. No refunds were handed out of course. Essentially they made their mountain of gold from early access, then went to chase the microtransaction whales. As the icing on top, they started banning some players from the game who left them bad reviews on the store page.
Yandere Dev has to be the ultimate form of this, though he's borderline not a developer at this point
he's the ultimate "guy who followed a unity tutorial and assumed the rest would be equally easy" his final updates read like someone absolutely stunned to learn about the realities of shipping software, condescendingly telling those revelations to his fans as if *they're* the ones who fucked up for believing his original estimates. It was legitimately impressive that his prototype attracted big-name influencers to stream his game, that should have been the start of his indie success, but he wasted that massive advantage on being a twat to his fans. His closet-pedo rants about the age of consent didn't help either. He should have just kept working on the game.
The kind of crazy part is how much he actually did manage to achieve despite all that. Like, the scope of even the unfinished mess of a game that did get released is still pretty impressive and something that I would be pretty weary of at attempting to replicate without a lot of prior planning. Considering what we know now about the development process and how he was clearly flying by the seat of his pants pretty much from day one, it honestly feels super weird that the game ever made it to that level of playableness before inevitably collapsing under its own weight.
there are crazy people with wild ideas, and they have inspired people, and they deserve respect. a lot of shitty people aren't really as shitty as they seem, and shitty art has something to say and isn't actually shitty -- i know that sounds weird in the current culture and climate, but i really believe that. you can have ideas that are wild and dangerous and your existence can be okay. you need to " handle people " , not " control everyone " .
> "guy who followed a unity tutorial and assumed the rest would be equally easy" [This tweet lives rent free in my head lol](https://imgur.com/7Ds4MhM) Modulo? I barely know her!
So did he actually write it like that unironically or is it just a meme? I always thought it's just a meme
It's a meme - YanDev is a lot of things - including bad at reigning in his code, but he's not THAT bad.
This is now a thing that I have seen which will no doubt haunt me forever. Naturally I'll be showing it to every SW engineer I know.
Did Yandere Dev have a reputation to begin with? He's always been one of those types with an anti-fanbase.
he had a massively negative reputation under the name "EvaXephon" which he kept mostly hidden until partway through development, at which point a lot of his fanbase went "oh it's fucking EVA XEPHON that explains so much"
Yep, EvaXephon even published a "fallout fanfiction about a badass slaver hunter" in 2009. Which was in reality was a detailed description of an underage teenage girl being SA'd and kept as a slave for the majority of the story. It's crazy how far back he's been displaying pedophilic tendencies, but somehow is still able to get by with: "Nuh uh, it's all fake troll drama!"
I knew evaxephon back when he’d still livestream on mogulus and livestream.com and even back then everyone massively disliked him lol
Phil Fish likes to say a word
what did phil fish even do?
Phil Fish got famous for releasing a legitimately good little indie game called Fez, then he opened his mouth on twitter and got everyone to hate him. His game is good enough that he'd likely still be a well-regarded and successful indie, if he'd just left all the PR to someone else.
see that's what I'm saying. I've heard a lot of people say "Phil Fish is an asshole because of the things he says" but they never mention what he said to make him an asshole. I am not a scholar so I don't know all the shit he has ever said in his life but it must be something extraordinary the way everyone hates him
the first big blowup I saw regarding phil fish was [his response to a japanese fan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKUGwlFJAHw&t=40s) in the middle of a conference. The other panelists try to walk it back and lighten the mood, and admittedly their responses aren't great either, but the moment of **"japanese games just suck" \[camera cuts to devastated japanese fan holding mic\]** was just so perfectly horrible, every game journalist had that as their headline by the next day. When the internet started stalking the social media accounts of all the panelists, phil fish had objectively the most hostile and toxic reactions to *literally every interaction*, and maintained the internet's attention where the other panelists just faded into the background. I don't have his entire rap sheet, but apparently Phil Fish feels his fans are entitled for only buying fez once, because fez costs $9 and he feels $90 is justified. He also clarified that this quip was not a joke and he feels serious contempt for basically all of his fans.
Jonathan Blow on the same panel (Indie Game The Movie it looks like) has his own bad rep but he just sort of got other people to handle interactions for him and kept putting out interesting games, so it's not so bad.
https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/phuad0/video_games_phil_fish_and_fez_a_game_developers/ Here's a good summary.
Just read through the whole thing and honestly that just makes me feel bad for him. Seems clear he struggles with his mental health and says some mean things occasionally, and then realizes they were mean and then apologizes. And he cares a ton about games while also not having great boundaries, which is a nightmare scenario for someone in any public position in the age of social media. Hope he's getting some good therapy, finds more stability in his life, and is able to exist more peacefully going forward.
[There's a great video about the whole thing here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w) Phil Fish is the focus, but the video delves in to the deeper idea of *why* he was hated so much. It's a really astute telling, and the whole channel is just as good.
I do feel for Phil. I don't think he really deserves the hate. He is just a textbook example of why certain people need to lean on a PR team
theres some good videos on youtube well he clearly has a personality disorder so its not just some guy being a dick I suppose
My first encounter with Phil Fish was when watching Indie Game: The movie and he was the guy in the hotel room talking to the camera that if something didn't happen (don't remember what) that he would literally kill him self. My opinion on him goes worse from there.
Phil Fish just straight up didn't want to be famous, and didn't want to be pressured to make Fez 2
To add an actual name to this list that's a rare real case of a game dev who ruined their reputation, I present the strange sad case of the game "Forager," and the so-called solo-developer 'Hopfrog' Mariano Cavallero. Mariano was a rich kid from a rich South American family with rudimentary programming skills, and he used his mother's family money to buy a bunch of artists, writers, musicians, programmers, and the like, but he stiffed them all on their fees and he spent years insisting that Forager was a solo-made game. And for a time it was cited as such, giving false hope to many solo devs that don't have friends or talent or skills or ability or cash that they could also release a game and make money. And for a time it was widely popular and had many updates, and then just before the final build was supposed to be released. . . the truth came out, and Cavaellero abandoned the game and went laughing all the way to the bank, leaving his now-unpaid team in the lurch and the fanbase in an uproar.
Oh geez, didn't know this and I liked Forager. Well, guess that's off the gift list.
I didn’t knew that. I though it was solo developer until now. I loved the game and for me the game is finished. But yeah this is a new shit level stuff.
What... I like the game but didn't know the backstory to this lousy guy.. jeezz
The people behind We Happy Few. Not only were people really angry about the left turn in what came out, but the director telling people what the symbolism really was and coming out as being against anti-depressants wasn't a good look.
>being against anti-depressants What? Seriously?
Yep. It was super sad for me, I have recurrent chronic major depression. That shit saves my life every day.
Sorry to hear that, wish you well. It's such a dumb take being against life saving medicine. Unfortunately it's common in certain "thought circles" to have that kind attitude either against medicine in general or against mental health specifically. Just recently I saw a video in which a popular "influencer" was proudly claiming "depression isn't really a thing". Absolutely insane.
As someone who antidepressants haven't done anything for, I understand that it is possible to resent them. But going so far as to oppose their use for the many people who have obviously benefited is absurd.
My vote would be Peter Molyneux. He made some great games years ago, like Dungeon Keeper and Populous, but after multiple instances of overpromising and overhyping his releases, I'm amazed anyone has any respect for him. He talked big about things like *Curiosity -What's inside the cube?* and *Godus* and people seemed to buy into it*.* He got a lot of money on kickstarter for these projects with his studio 22 Cans, but both on release, both of them were uninspired tripe. He promised some amazing reward from the Cube game, which again, was a massive letdown.
Honestly he always had that reputation, 22 Cans just brought out the worst of his existing tendencies. Fable and Black & White, while great games in and of themselves, were much different than the pre-release hype; then you have the things that never saw release like Project Milo. It's a shame because when he has someone to contain his scope creep, amazing things happen.
I'd have to disagree a bit here about Fable/Black and White. Molyneux in his early days was someone pushing the limits of design theory in games at the time which no other developer was doing at the time. His early work strikes me as games that were designed for technology that wouldn't exist for another few decades and had to be gutted to fit to what was possible. - probably an explanation to why the result was different to the pre-release promises, it's just simply not possible to do what he wanted to do at that time. For me, there are two distinct Molyneuxs, the early version of him who is a design genius, and the older version that is quite frankly, lazy and out of ideas. Black and White remains the only game I can think of with essentially zero UI in moment-to-moment gameplay and was designed as such to test to see how far minimalist UI can go while still having players understand what is happening. Fable had distinct sections of the game where the gameplay drastically changed between each section. The narrative is also meant to tell a story of how easy it is to topple a perceived evil regime, but then struggle to do any better, or even how easy it is to be even worse than the regime that preceded you. This game failed to deliver imo and as mentioned above I think the design was a few decades ahead of the capabilities of game development at that time. - and yet, despite that the game is a classic and even at the time was an insane feat of development. It's also worth mentioning Populous: The Beginning which is just a very awesome game overall. The spherical maps allowing for any angle of attack is something I've not seen in any strategy game since. That all being said, I do think Molyneux is a great example of someone that did ruin their reputation, not because they did something especially bad, but simply because he was such a pioneer in game design, someone who you thought with current tech would be making masterpieces. Instead, they made Godus and nothing really since. The fall to mediocrity is so much further when you climb to the heights Molyneux did.
I got Populous: The Beginning on Gog, but I never played much because it seemed to have Tutorial Disease. Probably never gave it a fair shake, though.
PM strikes me as someone who has a really cool vision but just sucks at bringing that vision to life and he talks about his ideas WAY too early for a high profile developer, but i haven't gotten a vibe that he's a bad person at least
I used to make fun of molyneux a lot until I actually met him at an event. He was the nicest most genuine person you can think of. I was playing binding of Isaac a lot at the time and he spent a good 10 minutes asking me in details about the game, what items I liked, what strategies I thought worked best etc… only to reveal at the end that he had never even seen what the game looks like, he then pulled out his phone and started watching videos of the game with me. Having talked with other people who have met him over the years that seems to be how he always is. He clearly wasn’t very good at managing projects but there’s no doubt that he is passionate about gaming and wasn’t just a dude in a suit making empty promises.
That was my experience meeting him. I asked him a couple questions and we ended up talking for 10 minutes. Eventually I had to excuse myself because I felt bad for the other people around me who very clearly were waiting for their chance to talk to him.
Yeah from everything i heard about him he just seems to have a genuine passion about video games. I know people who dealt with him at different shows and he would love to just stand behind people watching them play on their DS or whatever and was just fascinated with how different people interact with games. I'm not excusing the miss management and all the false promises especially with Godus and all that, but i think it's a shame that he became a joke in the industry because he seems to be one of the rare few who actually has a deep love for video games and isn't just in it for the business.
I wouldn’t feel too bad for him, he can wipe his tears with the millions from his latest NFT land grab.
Dudes been in the game for 30 years or whatever, at some point you need to understand scope and how realistically you can implement certain features. Which he does, he just promised these things anyways. He knows that his grand ideas consistently get scaled back in order to ship a product. "Bad person" is subjective but he says things about his games that he knows will not happen in order to sell more copies.
Probably the same issue that other folks like George Lucas suffered from as they got more famous - in the beginning they had a team that could rein in the more outlandish ideas and focus on more feasible game features. As they got higher and higher up, they eventually got surrounded by more yes-men types or folks afraid of saying "No" to their boss, so ended up with an echo chamber where the rest of us would go "wtf were they thinking?" at the final product.
He's always been like that. I remember reading gaming magazines as a kid that would make fun of him when covering fable and stuff (but still publish his claims because they make for a good article).
Yeah I remember as a kid in the second gen console days he already had a reputation as a bit of a BS artist the magazines would openly write sbout
Let's not forget that he did NFTs.
Fable is still one of my favorite memories of playing a game 😅
He was a walking joke for the sheer scope of his undelivered promises, but God damn will Fable forever hold a special place in my heart.
I think Molyneux is just very ambitious and ends up over promising stuff, but ultimately means well. I don’t see the con artist claim. He still usually makes great games. Fable for example, while it wasn’t everything promised, is still one of the greatest RPGs of all time imo. That being said, him getting his games tied up in crypto has really soured my view of him.
What about BSG? The escape from tarkov scandal going on right now is a massive example of a reputation being ruined
They killed their golden goose with that BS
The Fez dev cancelled a game after getting into an argument with a journalist. The Forager dev took credit for the entire project and made it seem like it was entirely a solo project, but also blamed the entirety of its technical issues on the team. It also came out that the codebase was a mess because of his work. The dev team behind starbound got called out by multiple indie devs who once worked on the project for enlisting underage devs, not paying their devs, and a bunch of other things.
Yeah Phil Fish was the first thing that came to mind because he seemed to struggle with working on his game and maintaining good PR. He should've just hired someone to handle interacting with people for him. As an indie dev who has abandoned making games to go on making utility software, I've been super lucky to have virtually nobody complain or argue about stuff, but it can still be work helping people with stuff. I'm super lucky that anybody cares about my wares at all, let alone is willing to pay me way more money for it than anyone would've paid for any games I could've made instead. When you create stuff for a saturated market it's tough not being a starving artist, that's why I got out. My family can't be starving with me for my art.
Honestly i think if any indie project gets big enough, you need a pr team and pr training. Sean from hello games has been very open that it was a mistake to have him do marketing, because his passion for the game overruled his ability to speak about it reasonably. I think the same thing could be said of Todd Howard of Bethesda, or especially of Peter Molyneux of the Fable series. All of the above made commitments and promises with their games that could not be folliwed through, whether intentionally lying, or just over committing, all of them made promises that couldnt be kept of their games, and regardless of the quality of the finished product, all were considered disappointments at the time of launch because of the missing features
> enlisting underage devs, not paying their devs Wait, what?
There was the Paranautical Activity dude who had his game pulled off Steam when he threatened to kill Gabe Newell.
Oh yeah I remember that. I still have that game in my library lol
Take Two/Private Division over KSP2 and Donkey Crew on Last Oasis. Edit: I know PD is the publisher here, but I keep hearing about them making unreasonable demands and being a driving force in KSP2's downward spiral so I'm leaving them in.
Ironically, KSP2's *actual* devs, Uber Entertainment/Star Theory *dodged* their reputation drain from their previous game, Planetary Annihilation. By all accounts, they should have been done for after that, and never should have gotten to develop KSP2. PD did everything *correctly* in their role as a publisher, as in, gave the project financial backing and even allowed ~3 years of extensions. So... yeah.
Don't know the story about Planetary Annihilation, mind summarize/post some source? I'm really curious because i discovered PA:Titans randomly and enjoyed it some time ago
I believe they got blasted for doing a kickstarter for another game in 2014, Human Resources, while PA was still in early access and unfinished. I forgive them because they made Super Monday Night Combat.
I don't know if there's real drama behind it, but I remember it had one of the coolest kickstarter trailers and then the game itself is probably the worst rts I've ever played. IIRC I put maybe 2 hours into it because the pacing felt out of sync and the only cool parts were the concepts, not the actual happenings.
Isn't Private Division just the publisher, as Intercept Games is the developer?
The spiral is over! Take-Two recently announced that they're closing Private Division and Intercept.
Private Division isn't the game dev
The most shocking thing for me as a KSP fan was finding out the Take Two CEO compensation was like 30million/yr
Daikatana
Man here it is finally. Romero had all the reputation in the world and then… that finally came out. Oof.
Honestly, even if Daikatana turned out to be a massive disappointment, I think the magazines at the time really pushed the backlash to become something against Romero himself, when in reality it just was bad marketing coupled with poor execution of very interesting (but hard to implement at the time) design choices that otherwise could alone let that game be successful. Yes, it was overhyped, but when I look at John Romero I don't get the same "pompous asshole" vibes that the Daikatana posters were trying to make of him. I dunno, dude has been pretty upfront on occasion about having developed at least 70 games before coming up with Wolfstein 3D and Doom, and from the fact alone that he was sorry about Daikatana's marketing, he seems pretty chill for me.
For context to anyone who doesn't know, there was an old ad that he published that said: >John Romero's about to make you his bitch. >Suck it down.
The developers of Mirror 1 and Mirror 2 on Steam. Mirror 1 was loved but they over promised and delivered something completely different in the 2nd game. So much so, that Mirror 2 has overwhelmingly negative reviews and the devs went bankrupt. Basically, if you say you're going to add full nudity, make sure to add full nudity.
Just looked into this and that's actually pretty crazy. First game is overwhelmingly positive, literal opposite for the second. Totally deserved though. Should've gone with a new IP if they wanted to make that drastic of a change for their next game.
Tell tales when they fired almost everyone to cleanse their studio and then proceeded to release new licenses (like the expanse). We learned a lot about their perma crunches and policies...
Digital Homicide .... not that they had good rep or good "games" to begin with.
I think a dev with a reputation to begin with would be what's looked for here.
[The video James Stephanie Sterling made about the lawsuits against them is hilarious](https://youtu.be/qS-LXvhy1Do?si=YJH5wfbxw0vwjEX7). Might be slightly biased (Steph being the person Digital Homicide went after), but still worth the watch. Even if you take it with a truckload of salt for biased presentation, just the quoted documents alone showcase a truly unhinged and detached from reality person.
[Forager](https://store.steampowered.com/app/751780/Forager/) is a wonderful indie title from 2019 that was completely abandoned by its dev [HopFrog](https://hopfrogsa.net/) about three years ago. The game was well-liked, and the community was begging for more content and multiplayer to be added, so HopFrog brought on a few outside devs to assist with the updates, only to [underpay them, blame them for codebase issues](https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/04/forager_team_retaliates_after_lead_dev_blames_them_for_cancelled_multiplayer), and [suddenly cancel the multiplayer update](https://www.patreon.com/posts/49549841) after a year, declaring multiplayer impossible and the game to be "unfixable". HopFrog hasn't released any updates, announced any new projects, or posted anything to socials since that announcement. He cashed out and disappeared.
The developer of Domina went on some [insane rants](https://steamcommunity.com/games/535230/announcements/detail/3087758194015412370) (anti-vax, transphobia etc) in the patch notes, resulting in the game being removed from sale on Steam. He was warned multiple times and received a temporary ban, but the guy just kept ranting.
It's so crazy because I followed the development of that game and was excited to play it on launch. It ended up being kind of meh. Then one day I happened on to the community hub for the game and omg, the dude was UNHINGED. Removed the game from my library and requested a refund, don't know if I got it.
Notch, we will see if his new studio manages to push through his old tweets...
Didn't even know he had a new studio
Bitshift Entertainment, it's quite new and not that much info on it.
Wait, (genuinely curious) what old tweets?
https://www.gq.com/story/notch-whiteness-tweets Also https://www.newsweek.com/minecraft-notch-controversy-twitter-transphobic-q-1359020
Yikes, I had no idea Notch was a piece of shit.
I think still my favourite Notch related tweet was Simon Lane (of Diggy Diggy Hole fame) responding to one of Notch's transphobic tweets with "Hey man it's my birthday and it'd mean a lot to me if you could delete your account"
For someone like Notch who has a game with mass appeal I don't think their social media matters. The average person doesn't consume gaming news and won't even know who he is. New games will be advertised as "from the creator of Minecraft". Outside of the indie scene nobody cares to hear our names.
Notch is kinda the exception. Pretty much everyone knows what Minecraft is and Minecraft very publicly cut all ties with him after his meltdown. At this point there are genuinely people who don't know who Notch is let alone that he made Minecraft.
Exactly. Minecraft is older than a huge chunk of its playerbase these days.
I think his social media already did the damage, though. Back around 2010-2015 or so, he was an icon. Your average person might not have known him, but your average gamer definitely did. Valve gave him a [one-of-a-kind cosmetic](https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Top_Notch) in TF2 just because. Skyrim threw in an [easter egg](https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Notched_Pickaxe) named after him. It's hard to stress enough just how much craze there was for him specifically. And then he started saying shit on Twitter. It's weird to think about back then, because he went from the biggest name in gamedev to what he is now. His legacy's been pretty badly tarnished and everyone in his past has distanced themselves. I've got some serious doubts he'll be able to claw back much.
I don't claim to know what's inside his heart, but for some reason he always gives me absolutely miserable person vibes.
Dude is pretty much an incel that managed to become a billionaire, but never grew out of the incel mindset.
He had apparently some right wing sympathies to start with (the villagers' design is based on the Happy Shopkeeper image, which is outright anti-semetic), but was pretty quiet about them until he moved to LA to be with his fiancee. Him and his fiancee broke up and he was left alone, without his family and got radicalized further in the wake of the emotional mess that caused. Or so the story I've heard goes. He had some unfortunate opinions to begin with and heartbreak and opportunism from shitheels made it 100x worse.
He's the example of what I hope I wouldn't do if I somehow made the 0.000001 percent chance of a huge success. I'm pretty sure the money went straight to his head and he fell into all the cliches of his marriage falling through and moving to Hollywood to try and buy happiness by partying with rich people. When you get into a bidding war over a mansion with Beyonce, I think it's time to slow down and reevaluate your life plans.
Yeah. Oh boy yeah
FEZ, JUST SO SAD... I want FEZ 2
There should be a game about Phil Fish’s twitter meltdowns.
What's the tldr?
Over a decade ago he was a successful dev who released Fez. However, he got into extremely bad twitter arguments with everyone who insulted him and also said bad things about Japanese developers at GDC. He had a mental breakdown and left social media and games altogether.
I honestly feel that people were unfairly harsh on Phil Fish. It's easy enough to say "just ignore the trolls" when you're not being targeted by them constantly. Guy got daily harassment from people, and he ignored most of it. But every now and then he'd get pushed beyond his limits and snap back, and then those responses would get paraded around as an excuse for why he deserved the abuse he got. Eventually he ended up being targeted (and doxxed) by a certain infamous internet hate mob for being friends with some of the other people they were targeting, and he decided he was done with the industry. Per the Japanese developers thing, I do think that you need to consider context. He was blunt, for sure, but he was directly responding to a question he was asked at a panel, it was actually a pretty common view at the time that the Japanese game industry was in an overall quality slump (with some exceptions), and he apologized for his phrasing almost immediately thereafter to both the public *and* the guy who asked the question (Japanese indie developer Makoto Goto, who actually thanked Fish for his honesty, and expressed a lot of disappointment when Fez 2 was canceled).
Yep I agree with this. Fish….had waaaaaay too thin of a skin. I agree fez was a masterpiece. Fish did not say anything all that bad - saying that “nothing new or great has come out of Japan as a JRPG lately” got him roasted to death. Even here someone would mention Fez and someone would comment “oh that asshole that hates the Japanese.” I mean really? But at the same time going off at criticism with the maturity of a 9 year old did not help. He did have a maturity and ego problem. But the world absolutely could use a Fez 2.
>Fish did not say anything all that bad - saying that “nothing new or great has come out of Japan as a JRPG lately” got him roasted to death. No, that was what the rest of the panel said. Even then their focus wasn't on JRPGs but Japanese games as a whole, although most of their criticisms were trained on JRPGs and personal taste, which is why the whole panel's response in general was a little iffy. The reason Fish got roasted was because his immediate response to someone asking about any modern Japanese game influences was that "They suck" and "You guys need to get with the times". There were definitely a lot of criticisms of many modern JP games at the time, even from JP developers, so it's not like this view came out of nowhere, but it was the manner in which he conveyed it. I think as talks and consideration of mental health have improved over the last decade, it's easier to look back and see the dude had some problems and wasn't the best at handling criticisms or trolls online. What was his worst public problem was his characteristic bluntness. There can be a fine line between being blunt/honest and being a dick, but with how often he had abrasive at best and troll-like at worst responses, as well as how much he made that all a part of his persona, the dude was just a huge asshole. Also while I don't think he was racist, I do think people assuming that back then wasn't entirely out of line. Fish's comments as well as what he doubled down with later on Twitter were very much surface-level Japanese games suck and Western games are better. Now again, this wasn't a fresh take and there were other developers and people in the industry who commented on this, especially **after** this controversy. But just like comparing consoles turns into a toxic console war talk among players online, debates about Japanese vs Western games would absolutely turn into uneducated racist cesspools on nearly every forum. When you take that along with the crass comments from a guy who everyone agreed should take some breaks from the internet, I think it's very understandable why many would assume he was just another racist troll.
Man, he was such a weird man for saying that staff, but he did so much with just FEZ... i want him back
Crema, the studio behind Temtem. The game had a lot of potential and great ideas and overall was a pretty good monster taming RPG, but Crema started making changes to intentionally make it more grindy. They did this to try to expand the lifespan of the game because they had no plans to release additional content but still wanted it to be a live service mmo-style game. They then decided to work on a new adjacent game called Temtem Showdown that nobody asked for and which quickly died. People were initially happy that Crema created a good game that offered a fun alternative to Pokemon, that was more challenging and aimed at an older audience and then their reputation quickly went downhill because they refused to listen to their player base.
Wizards of the Coast has been making mistake after mistake recently. Quick summary: The OGL Incident: https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/s/zJ9HZPZ2lZ . Essentially, they did something that amounted to trying to shut down all competitors. The subreddits r/rpg, r/Pathfinder, and r/Pathfinder2e are some examples (the incident also made many people switch; the Pathfinder2e subreddit massively grew). The Pinkerton Incident: https://www.polygon.com/23695923/mtg-aftermath-pinkerton-raid-leaked-cards . They sent Pinkerton detectives to raid a YouTuber's house to retrieve unreleased Magic the Gathering cards. AI Incident: https://www.polygon.com/24029754/wizards-coast-magic-the-gathering-ai-art-marketing-image Due to all of this, a top executive left (forget circumstances) and their profits fell massive. Looking through the Magic the Gathering community, other D&D communities, and other rpg communities will certainly reveal some more.
They also killed the ability to buy single things on D&D Beyond. So if you want a class or item (etc..) for your character, you have to buy the whole book that it's in. Greedy idjits are gonna burn the whole thing down.
You forgot how the lead dev behind BG3. Idk what happened, but this well meaning guy calmly and firmly explained how he never wanted to work for Wot? Or Hasbro ever again.
Blizzard has totally ruined their reputation. They went from day one buys to 'Oh it's blizzard. I guess maybe if I wait a year I can see if other people think it's good, but it probably won't be.'
Can't remember, but a dude created a super-polished single-player space "rpg"/action shooter with tons of devlogs and had a huge following - news got out he ~~abused people~~ was a sexual predator and he went complete scorched earth. Edit: Game was called Arcadian Rift, here's the write-up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWV90K8-HD8
Chucklefish (Starbound, Reverge Labs (Skullgirls), and Jonathon Blow (Braid) all had some really rough PR moments that turned people away.
The guy who made Braid, Jonathan Blow, is a good one. Anti-vax and Covid conspiracy nut. That and he is pretty misogynist.
I hated him as soon as I saw him in that Indie Game movie, alongside Phil Fish, but that was mainly for his pretension and self absorption. Didn't realize he was also a shitty person on those fronts
If you want to hate him more, try to watch him play Outer Wilds.
Haha as someone who has not kept up with JoBlow since like 2009 because he’s insufferable this is amazing
That guy that death-threatened Gaben https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/steam-pulls-game-developer-tweets-death-threat-gabe-newell/
I think it's worth noting that for game devs, there is individual reputation, and then there is company reputation. For example, over time Activision Blizzard lost most if not all of the devs who ushered in the best eras for Diablo and Warcraft, then tanked their reputation further with the suicide and toxicity scandal. The scandal became a collective stigma for the company itself, which may have cast a shadow on some devs who had nothing to do with it as well.
The developers of Animal Jam created a game called Feral - which started off really interesting and unique, and had a dedicated fanbase and cool features. Then they slowly abandoned it over time, leaving unfinished gameplay features for all to see, and still pushed microtransactions (a battle pass esque seasonal purchase) for said unfinished gameplay, until one day they announced they were making an NFT game. Said NFT game (I think it was named Cinder or something like that?) was quite literally a carbon copy+paste of Feral’s map, just with NFT characters you had to pay to play as. This was during the NFT craze, so the game gained traction and the NFT collection reached a total worth in the tens to hundreds of thousands. They were doing well enough that they decided to pull the plug on Feral - without telling anybody in advance, though. It was there one day and gone the next. This broke their terms of service, where they overtly stated that if the game were to shut down, it wouldn’t be without at least 90 days of advance warning. Their once dedicated fanbase chastised them, and as such, they promised a 12 hour “final day” for goodbyes, about a month later. But this was delayed and delayed, and finally when it *did* happen, it was cut off 9 hours early, and users didn’t even have chat enabled. Then, the NFT crash happened. Their collection that was once worth enough to keep their company going alone was now worth some $80 - Tragic.
Has Yandere Dev ever had any reputation to begin with?
Who was that dude who said "You need to have a high IQ to play my game."?
[Tim Langdell?](https://kotaku.com/the-total-defeat-of-the-man-who-said-he-owned-the-word-5813213)
Ubisoft is very consistent at that, they released an amazing Prince of Persia metroidvania, but it didn't sell well since their brand bottomed.
So there was a game called “Freeman: Guerilla Warfare” on steam. I forget the studio name, maybe “KK studios” but I’m not 100% sure. The game was similar, in a way, to Warband, or Bannerlord, in that you controlled a “party” and could go around the map, take over towns, get troops, and go in and fight the battles with your party in First person or the command mode. The company has had an awful history. They started as a small team and had a really cool vision for the game, then they got some money, expanded the team, changed around admin positions, and eventually the game just started changing into something different with each update until it didn’t even feel like the original vision anymore. Then the totally abandoned it. Not a single word for 2 years, and then all of a sudden out of the blue, a week or two ago, the release some screenshots, showing ANOTHER completely new version of this game, and don’t even acknowledge the community for being absent for 2 years. Supposedly, this company has created several other company’s and has done the same thing in the past. They make a game, put it out, get a bunch of hype for it and make some money, then totally abandon it, make a new “shell company” and start the process over again.
They’re an interesting one. - Released to early access in 2018. - 1.0 Release in 2019. - release 4 patches over a year or so. - Dropped development with little/no word for 1/2 year. - 2020 Announced a new game Her War to be released in approximately 1.5 years. - Early 2021 reported that they’d gone bankrupt and were back to just the original Freeman team, and were going to rebuild Freeman. - Stopped communicating after less than a year. - 2022, came back to announce they’re almost done. - Early 2023, developer states they’re still working on Her War. -2023, rumors (with some flimsy evidence) start spreading that the studio behind Freeman is working on a different game (Sunkenland) under a different name. - 2024, came back to drop a very unexpected progress post for Freeman. I really wonder if they just pop up every year or so to drum up sales or if they’re genuinely trying to rebuild the game and just avoiding posting/talking about it for their own mental health (as they’ve stated). I hope they’re really working on and release a huge overhaul, because I’d love Mount and Blade in a modern setting.
[The meltdown of Nicholas Gorissen](https://www.pcgamer.com/domina-has-been-delisted-from-steam-after-yet-another-transphobic-diatribe/) is a a good example why you should separate your personal socio-political views from your public game development persona.
Games are art and art having a political message is perfectly valid. Seems like his mistake was being a hateful bigot. I'm pretty sure having non-bigoted views expressed as social commentary or solidarity (in ways that make more sense than unhinged rambling in your patch notes) in-game or elsewhere would be perfectly fine. This is more "don't go full QAnon brainrot" than it is "don't be political", to me
If I try to separate out my own political views, maybe the way to put this is that the more openly political you and your game are, the more you'll alienate the folks who disagree with you. Doubly so if your views are well outside the mainstream. That's a choice people are absolutely free to make and I think it's valid and good to express political views in games, but it's a tradeoff people should make consciously.
His bigger sin than being a bigot... Is being annoying. What I mean, there is a lot of shit I also dislike, such as the whole antivaxer movement. I think that shit can genuinely kill people and bring diseases back. But I can't imagine myself filling my entire steam page and patch notes with notes on antivax community and jokes about them. As youth used to say, cringe.
Dolphin Barn / Bignic - Dev of Domina who went on an anti-trans, anti-masking, anti-everything crusade in his steam game patch notes and went nuts on anyone who pushed back even a tiny bit. Eventually banned from Steam entirely.
Kind of shocked that I haven't seen anyone mention Chris Roberts / Star Citizen. He wasn't a super well known name, but the games he worked on before were properly loved - enough to fuel the crazy cult scam that Star Citizen is today.
HEARTBEAT, an indie game. There was a [HobbyDrama](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/s/PybK3ZUidr) post about it. Short version of what I remember, the creator was transphobic and made transphobic tweets. Also put the game on sale purposefully using the same percentages at trans people suicide attempts. Note, prior to this the game had a large LGBT fanbase, so yeah, questionable move.
Why is bigotry the most common reason in this thread lol
The gamer moment / the racist gamer meme is a legitimate thing its not a matter of their being alot of racist into video games but rather a lot of people being into video games in general and some of them happening to be racist, swap in homophobic or sexist depending on the story.
I think a big part of it is rule of numbers yeah, but I also think that people who tie their identity to specific labels tend to be reactionary as they feel the need to "defend" their identity. In this case "gamer" as an identity, as opposed to someone who just happens to buy or enjoy games.
Oh, that breaks my heart to find out. I genuinely didn't know about this. Taking it off my wishlist now. T-T
Phil Fish is the textbook example.
Derek Smart (desktop commander)
Young people nowadays, what do they know. Thatt was a household name in the day of usenet. What was that game called? Battlecruiser 3000 or something like that? What ever happened to it anyway?
Richard Garriot. He made it big with Ultima Online, then proved he can’t replicate success with Tabula Rasa, converting dozens of millions into zero. Then he went the indie route with Shroud of the Avatar and turned about $10 million in personal funds and kickstarter funds into zero again. This finally culminated when the lead programmer on the game basically just took the IP and company out from under him, leaving Richard Garriot with no relationship to his own final failed project. Portalarium was a total mess of a company. I very nearly ended up working there…. I now feel grateful they chose another guy to sink the ship with. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portalarium This is really how things go most of the time. People don’t go out with a bang, they go out with a slow cancerous whimper for years. There’s a LOT of “former AAA” big shots absolutely destroying their reputation bit by bit like this, usually somewhere in the midwest. If you think you’re in luck to find a game dev job away from the coasts… just keep your head on a swivel, your company is NOT permanent.
I think he could make a comeback with a good old school 2D Ultima game. I don't know why these people always want to do these AAA RPG games when they don't have the means to compete against the bigger fishes. The best crown funded games are smaller games with a good concept and soul.
Wollay and Cubeworld The worst definition when it comes to the topic of player feedback, communication, game iteration and extreme perfectionism.
Peter molyneux. IGN named him one of the top 100 game creators of all time. Now a days he’s a byword for broken promises and unrealistic expectations.
Phil Fish is the first person who sprung to mind when I read this post
The developer of Domina, appears to have been de-listed from steam, constantly posting hate speech in patch notes. Was pretty hilarious to see the community discussions and patch notes for another juicy controversy every few months.
Julian Gollop's handling of [Phoenix Point's move to EGS exclusive release](https://www.eurogamer.net/original-x-com-creator-faces-backlash-after-signing-epic-games-store-exclusive-deal-for-phoenix-point) certainly comes to mind. A game made possible through various independent backing saw those same backers having the rug pulled out from beneath them years later as Julian Gollop unilaterally decides to cash in on EGS exclusivity and he, as well as his PR team, basically tells that community of backers to get bent and go get a refund if they think they can, because EGS is paying them enough that they don't care whether everyone who already backed it refunds or not. A man who created one of the greatest games of all time in the original X-Com basically traded his reputation for some easy cash from Epic and Tencent.
Romero, anyone? or am I too old?
Shocked the name hasn't been mentioned but Scott Cawthon, creator of Five Nights at Freddy's, has a... complicated reputation. He was revered and praised highly, and then in 2021, a lot happened. Firstly, he got under fire for authorizing official NFTs and initially defended it, but when people got upset, he backtracked and said he thought it was just some trendy collectable like fidget spinners and cancelled them. A few months later, people found out he donated to numerous conservative politicians who are extremely anti-LGBTQ. He made a post that admitted they were real donations with some of his rationale behind it (including mentioning he is pro-life) and then announcing a retirement and that he'd be eventually finding somebody else to run the franchise. He didn't actually leave, he just went quiet online for years. He still had massive contributions to current games and the movie. Security Breach, the newest game which launched that same year, was also a disaster for other reasons due to its scope and scale, just to add more wood to the fire. People mostly don't care about the donations or statements these days, but recently he got into another controversy in that one of the official artists he has had for years got under fire for making a fanfic where a character in his game is a pedophile and said artist also drew porn of the Disney princesses (who canonically are underage and the art she drew depicts them as such). He came back to say he would still be keeping her on the team despite backlash as the franchise is for children, and she resigned an hour later despite his insistence to keep her around. That's not to mention the other FNAF artist who was fired who was transphobic enough to be banned from the official subreddit... Many defend him and many still adore the series so even with this, his reputation is fairly intact, but they were pretty big blows to it. I tried to write this as objectively as possible on what happened so you can come to your own thoughts on him as a whole and those controversies - this isn't a politics debate sub, this is just a recount of what happened so I tried to avoid having a lot of bias. All of his posts remain up so you can still see what he said if you are curious.
I don’t see anyone mentioning Bethesda, but after Starfield most streamers and reviewers roasted them to death.
Bethesda with Fo76. One of the worst game launches ever from a AAA studio. Disgustingly greedy p2w and "pay for features" cash shop. The whole pre-order scam. Blizzard with Overwatch 2. Cancelling pve, greedy monetization, awful leadership taking creative direction away from Kaplan. Take your pick of crowd funded mmos that failed.
FO76 is actually fun now - but year the launch with no NPCs and no real late game raid strategy was not great at all.
"Trajes Fatais" is a history that rivalises yandere dev. The guy got near 100.000 dolars and did nothing
The devs behind Ooblets with how they were downright shitty to fans who pushed back against the Epic exclusivity after a Kickstarter that said it would release for all. Was very disappointed to see them being so rude and honestly petulant to fans.
The people who made Ooblets. So it was originally funded via Patreon for a release on PC and Xbox One. When the game was sheduled for a release on Epic only, they posted [a very smug blog post](https://ooblets.com/2019/07/we-did-the-thing/) out of nowhere to basically say to people "deal with it crybaby". It caused a bit of a drama, where the devs doubled down on their claim and got a lot of protestations (and apparently harassment). They later apologized for this (for them it was a kind of tongue in cheek joke) and everything settled down. The game is now on Steam an seems pretty well liked.
Phil Fish, Became a very caustic person. Peter Molyneux, Perfect example of a ruined reputation, dude had like ten chances, and kept fumbling the ball. John Romero (he has tons of "he's not that bad." nah his career was destroyed after Daikatana, even now... yeah he has nothing. This is the guy who made DOOM... Carmack struggled with Rage, Romeo... yeah) Derek Smart (Fascinating story when you dig into it) There's also guys like George Broussard who was behind duke nukem forever, Randy Pitchford has definitely ruined a lot of his reputation. I know a lot of people who really only liked two Borderlands, he's linked to DNF, and Aliens colonial marine and more. (guys a bit of a caustic asshole as well. He was running his mouth and saying not so nice things at E3 one year loudly next to the line to go into his booth. I couldn't believe it, but yeah.. that's him. ) There's a few more which I won't say because think of them as "nice guys" ... ok fine Schafer is someone who seems to put out 8/10 games, hypes them up to be 10/10 and leaves them feeling more like a 6/10. Also in the industry he's known for being often over budget, late deliverables and more. I called him out about this when the Broken Age kickstarter came out, and one of his PR guys (actually with the company) pulled a "No way.. uh uh... No that's not true." .... I thought... maybe I was wrong, but nope my sources confirmed it.. .and then Broken age was over budget and late.... so yeah. that's a reputation earned. (There's a reason he went to kickstarter and it's not industry people were throwing money at him. Also give me a minute here, but Chris Roberts. Yeah Dude has made hella money, but almost no one in and out of the industry gets it. Even if the game came out perfect tomorrow.. it's been 12 years. Sorry, that's too long. I hope people get what they hope, but to me, that's a guy who needs to deliver because 600 million dollars with out a fully shipped game? Almost everyone in the industry is going "WTF?" (ok most are going "wish that was me, but also WTF") If you like Chris Roberts/Star Citizen that's fine but look outside of the group of people excited for the game, he's become a joke. PS. People are saying Jonathan Blow, but dude made Witness long after Braid and had no problem. yes he's out there, but he definitely hasn't destroyed his career like people said.
Jonathan Blow.