Which publisher is worse? Konami or Electronic Arts?
I'm kind of bored so I wanted to talk about the worst video game studios in the world. In case someone doesn't know what they both have done, I'm gonna list the worst decisions they have been doing for decades.
EA
* Buying and shutting down great studios (Bullfrog Productions; Westwood Studios; Origin Systems; NuFX; Pandemic Studios; Playfish; Black Box Games; DreamWorks Interactive; Phenomic Game Development; Victory Games; Mythic Entertainment; Maxis Software; EA Salt Lake; Visceral Games). They almost bought Valve Corporations which could have a huge nightmare for PC players.
* Adding pay-to-win microtransactions in full-priced AAA games.
* Claiming that "Single Player Games are dead, that's why focusing on multiplayer is better".
* Giving Mass Effect Andromeda to a new development team and releasing it unfinished. Also, they're blaming The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Both released in the same month) for their failure, SMH.
* Cancelling Amy Hennig's Star Wars project for being a single player game.
* Turning the Command & Conquer franchise into a mobile game.
* Despite the Star Wars Battlefront 2 controversy, they're still going to add microtransactions in their future games.
* Turning Battlefield 5 into a game directed by Michael Bay (No wonder the pre-orders are weak).
* Releasing Titanfall 2 just a week after Battlefield 1, thus getting poor sales despite receiving tons of great reviews.
* Making their employees work more than 24 hours.
* Has no interest in remastering or remaking games.
Konami
* Cancelling Silent Hills, despite being the most downloaded demo on Playstation Store.
* Treating their employees like prisoners.
* Metal Gear Survive. Instead of remaking the first Metal Gear Solid or finishing Chapter 3 of Metal Gear Solid 5, they thought adding zombies in a stealth-driven franchise was going to make so much money. What's worse is that they forced you to pay for extra save slots.
* Firing Hideo Kojima, thus not letting him finish Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, pulling his name out of the box art and banned him from attending The Game Awards 2015.
* Turning great franchises into Pachinko machines, that includes Silent Hill and Castlevania.
* Silent Hill HD Collection. More like a downgraded edition: horrible graphics, change of sound effects, different voice acting, so many bugs, glitches and frame drops it makes them unplayable.
* No interest in re-releasing their best games.
Which company do you think deserves to be shut down?
Comments
well first and foremost neither of them. they've both published good games and have impacted the industry whether positively or negatively. no company deserves to be shut down unless they're directly harming animals or raping people or some shit. your hatred is blinding your judgement a lil bit. i hate konami as much as the next guy but it's a bit of an odd thing to say that you want millions of people to be out of a job and not able to provide for themselves or their families.
secondly it's hard to say which company is worse, konami has taken a very "fuck the fans" approach while EA has been loyal to the few EA fans there by releasing the exact same shit over and over so said fans get what they want, but they both have been very disrespectful to their developers, konami screwing over kojima and EA playing destroyer of worlds and shutting down many companies who previously made great games. then we have EA being so scummy they literally changed gambling laws due to their recklessness, and konami who upon receiving criticism on the silent hill hd collection said that the wrong version was released an the real hd collection exists, but they already had our money so they decided just to keep the version released as is anyway. finally, while konami hasn't released even a mediocre game since 2009, EA is publishing games so insanely frequently that a few of them have actually been playable and fun, meaning they at the very least accidentally release an alright game here and there.
so really it depends on what you find more scummy, fucking over your fans every 3 seconds but staying relatively out of the greedbag honeypot aside from the HD Collection thing and the save slots dlc, or being an absolute fucking sleazebag company with no morals, but still constantly pandering to the few fans you have. it's honestly a lose lose here. i definitely don't think those two are the worst companies in the industry though. there are a few others who come to mind that boil my blood. one more thing though.
this is not an inherently bad thing, it's a bad thing if the game is bad or not fun but if the game turns out to be just as good as it's pc counterpart then that's great because you can take a great game on the go.
i think it looks like a piece of shit though lol.
You're pretty much right for the most part but there are things that I think need to be clarified/corrected.
Apparently the project in the first place wasn't looking too good which is why it was put on hold (in which case it would be understandable to cancel it). It's supposedly being re purposed for another project.
There are obviously cases of them overworking employees (60 to 80 hours a week) but they have not forced employees to work 24 hours straight. EA isn't the only company to do this. Even consumer friendly studios like CD Projekt came under fire for overworking and under paying employees just last year.
Have you not played a Battlefield game since Bad Company 2?
They released Burnout: Paradise Remastered in March on consoles and the PC version is out this week.
Neither of them. Hundreds (if not thousands) of people shouldn't lose their jobs because the people they work for are assholes. But if I had to choose who were the worst company I'd pick Konami. As you said they literally treat their employees like prisoners sent to be worked in the pachinko mines. It would take me too long to list off the shit they've done. Like seriously, much of what they've done is so incredibly petty. At least EA still puts out good games and treats some of their developers well like Coldwood Interactive (Unravel) and Hazelight Studios (No Way Out).
konami made silent hill shattered memories which is one of my fav games so i cant hate them. idk if i ever played an EA game.
Oh I loved shattered memories and that soundtrack still sticks with me after all these years, so underrated ;-;
shattered memories gets a lot of unwarranted hate because it came out in that era of silent hill games, but i think for a silent hill game that is:
it's actually super solid and deserves more credit than it gets. also come on, mary elizabeth mcglynn was at her best with the music in this game. her vocals in 3 are great but you can't beat hell frozen rain and acceptance.
Shutting them down is a little much.
While we're talking about underrated Silent Hill games, I would just like to add that Downpour also deserves more credit than what it gets. Yes, the gameplay could have used more polish, and it was super buggy, but the atmosphere and story I felt were very good. It told a story similar to Silent Hill 2 without being a complete rehash, and it actually treated Pyramid Head with respect by not using him at all except for a fun easter egg. Maybe I'm a bit biased because it was actually my introduction to the series and I prefer stories that are more akin to Silent Hill 2, but I truly feel that Downpour is very underrated.
If I had to pick a company to be shut down, it would probably be EA mostly just because most of their games don't interest me and Konami owns more IPs that do. Of course, I wouldn't want them to be shut down and for many people to lose their jobs (though I don't think the people at Konami would mind too much). Ideally I'd rather they get new management that knows how to respectfully run their business without pissing off everybody under them. Maybe then these companies wouldn't be so hated.
FUCK EA. Today i was playing sims 4, yes sims 4 now stfu. They need to fix their game, alot of bugs its just frustrating.
EA is hit or miss, but they generally put out high quality games that are overshadowed by stupid implementation of microtransactions. I got no idea how bad FIFAs is, but if it's anything like their UFC and Madden Ultimate Teams, then it's terrible. The Battlefront 2 controversy was overblown, though.
Konami, in the other hand, is absolute ass. Really? Not only are you milking Metal Gear by trying to capitalize on the survival game market with minimal effort, you're selling save slots? Save slots? They cancelled Silent Hills, del Toros experience was so bad he said he wasn't sure if he wanted to even attempt another try at a game. And I am so glad that they were outed live at the VGAs for having their lawyers prohibit Kojima from showing up to accept the award for MGSV. Everything from them doing what as much as possible to remove Kojimas name from promotional material for the game to disrupting the actual development of the game, the bonus materials show casing Act 3 that seems to not exist because Konami was so intent on getting the project finished and officially cutting ties with him, it was disgraceful.
While we're on this topic, someone I almost never hear brought up in the conversation is Epic Games. I'm sure most people have heard of Fortnite, some may not know that "Save The World" mode wasn't originally a mode. It was just Fortnite. A 40 dollar closed beta(minimum, you could buy special editions coating upwards of 200 dollars, I believe) that was littered with microtransactions under the the guise that it would be going free to play upon leaving it's beta stage in Q1 2018. And everything was locked behind these lootboxes. Heroes(not skins, actual characters with different skill sets and usefulness), weapons(all of which are subject to RNG bonuses, so one copy of the same gun might be much better than another), and a hard focus on grinding for materials to be able to craft these guns. They were also full of a bunch of other stuff that were essentially stat boosters, further crowding the pool of crap available. And unlike other F2P games that provides the option to purchase characters you wish to use individually, you HAD to buy these lootboxes for a chance to get a playable character in the flood of other unwanted items they also contained. And you were given time consuming daily quests that would allow you to purchase one, maybe 2.
And here, over a year after release and months after it was supposed to be free, it's still in paid beta, last I checked the main story hasn't been finished yet, I don't even think they've worked on it, and it's still littered with microtransactions absent any way to purchase specific items lootboxes contain. Minimal work has been done because the majority of the team was moved over to support Battle Royale after getting the early investors money. The actual Fortnite game people paid for doesn't look like it's going to be completed anytime soon, because they were able to build on it and release BR thanks to the beta testers unwitting support. Epic is trash on levels I haven't see in a while.
EA is terrible, they make important plot points as dlc, add microtransactions and multiplayer to single player games, they lie frequently, they push games for early release causing cut content, they don't usually update their games unless there's enough backlash and they've even tried to make dlc for dlc.