At this point, probably Bethesda.
This is a company that represents a lot of what I hate about a lot of modern gaming practices. They release clearly unfinished and buggy games that, while pretty to look at and are very large, lack a really compelling narrative and really much of any substance. And it only seems to get worse with each game.
You have Oblivion's quest lines which have you go visit every branch of the guilds you wish to join and complete quests for, in particular the Mage's Guild in which I think you have to pass a test in every city before you can go to their headquarters and do the real stuff.
Skyrim meanwhile, barely has around half a dozen or so missions before it ends and you become leader of the College of Winterhold. What's worse is that you don't even have to be proficient at magic to earn that title which makes no sense. (Granted, the same could be said for Oblivion, but at least it felt like you had to work from the bottom upwards.)
Now, all of this I can just write off as a bunch of well meaning but incompetent developers. But what really gets my goat with them is how they freely allow people to mod their games. Which, normally, is kind of a cool thing to do, however, when you consider the state their games usually are and how a couple years back, there was the whole "paid mods" controversy, it honestly sounds to me that not only are they having players fix up the bugs for them, but they're tried to profit off of them as well.
That is shady as fuck and I can't believe we ever got to this point.
So yeah, unless if it's a new Obsidian Fallout game, I don't plan on giving Bethesda any more money.
here's a perfect chance to say that all things considered the bethesda/zenimax conglomerate is kinda gross
to begin with, the board of directors (
https://www.zenimax.com/about - yes, there's a trump on there) is already shady as fuck. as far as i can tell it's stayed mostly the same for years - most people on the board have been there since the company was founded (
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/vprr/0704/07043400.pdf) and consists pretty much entirely of ancient butt buddy lawyers, attorneys and executives (at least, moonves, del, and altman have been best friends for decades) who'll start dishing out lawsuits the second you let them off their leashes. as far as i can tell, chris weaver, bethesda's founder, founded it with robert altman in '99 to manage bethesda's finances and legal shit before altman and his fuccbois ended up outing him from the company
weaver filed a lawsuit against him (
http://www.courts.state.md.us/businesstech/pdfs/mdbt7_04_opinion.pdf) which ended up being settled out of court because he did shady shit regarding the information he dug up - he went through company emails to get them. he's still a shareholder, but altman (who got into some deep shit with the feds in the '90s:
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/04/business/clifford-and-altman-settle-with-fed-over-bcci.html) still runs the show
they've done some incredibly shady shit with the devs they acquire - the human head/prey 2 situation is probably the most famous example, but it seems like they did something similar with arkane, using deadlines and loans to fuck them over to the point where they could snap them up for a super low price. this is the company that's gone after notch and "praey" for the gods for "infringing on their trademark". their outside auditors and legal counsel, kpmg and dla piper, are both well regarded, so they definitely have connections. they've gone after oculus and won, and now they're going after samsung.
it fucking sucks that most people only hate bethesda and todd because their games past morrowind are kinda shit, and not because the suits behind them are a bunch of old, greedy, litigious cunts who do some insanely suspicious shit to keep their company on top. i hope the paid mods situation convinced at least a few people they're fucking scumbags, although it's been a few years and it doesn't look like anything's drastically changed - they'll probably never hit that same level of "cool video game company to hate" that corporations like ea, ubisoft, and activision have, and it's a shame. one person boycotting a company doesn't do jackshit, but they're still the only developer/publisher i try not to buy from on principle. if there's
one games company you have to boycott, please god, don't fucking buy anything from zenimax or anything they own: bethesda, id, arkane. just don't.
