Scand𒊎als and controversies make the world go round. Or, at least politics and the internet. However, gaming hasn’t escaped the watchful eyes of local gossips. A whole host of scandals has plagued the video game world from its very inception. These controversies range from glitch-filled games and poor PC ports to claims that video games cause mass shoot💃ings and beyond.

Now, there are🎃 way too man♔y to put on a single list. Heck, the Pokémon and Grand Theft Auto series co♈uld pro🦹bably each have their own dedicated lists. In Grand Theft Auto’s case, most of the scandals are actually created on purpose as a way to increase PR. We dedicated an article to fifteen of these controversial stunts no💖t too loꦅng ago. Pokémon isn’t nearly as insidious𒉰, but that doesn’t stop the controversie﷽s from coming. Even arcade games can't avoid making the news.

In th🅺is list, I offer a walk down memory lane. Many of these scandals are recent, but some go all the way back to the days the Sega Genesis and the arcade machine. Now, be warned, some of these do cover moreᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ sensitive topics. But those who can handle it are in for a real treat.

I꧟f there are any scandals that you think should be on this list, let us know!

15 Terrorism (Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2)

Video games have been blamed 🌼for violence and shootings ever since their inception. Heck, video games were once (falsely) described as the cause of the Columbine shooting. A massive number of scientific studies looked into the relationship between kids, violence, and video games. While there is no consensus on the subject, that didn’t stop people fr✅om pointing fingers at video games. It didn’t help that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 mꦰade headlines thanks to its inappropriate subject matter.

For those who don’t know, your character played as a deep cover operative in a terrorist cell. This is already a very to⛄uchy subject, but Modern Warfare 2 decided to handle it with all grace of a hyperactive puppy in a glass museum. In the “No Russian” mission, you head into an airport and massacred a crowd of unarmed civilians. It caused a huge controversy that was so big, BBC reported on it. Infinity Ward tried to fix things by making the mission skippable and removed any coll🤡ectibles from that areꦿa. Even so, people still claimed that the game promoted terrorism.

14 No Man’s Lies (No Man’s Sky)

The amount of hype that surrounded No Man’s Sky was almost legendary. The procedurally generated universe was on an unprecedented scale. So much so that a gamer could dedicate the rest of their lives to the game and still only visit a small fraction of the available planets. Hello Games showed a spectacular gameplay trailer and promised players the chance to name planets, animals, and plants that they discovered in their travels. It was even described as a kind of MMO where you could meet other players, but because of the sheer size of the game doing so would be rare. The three alien factions present in the game would be at war with one another and players could get caught in epic sp💮ace battles if they weren’t careful. However, the actual game was vastly different from what Hello Games promised.

While yes, the game really was as big as they said, most of the planets were just slight variations of each other with some of the most ridiculous looking creatures imaginable. The “gameplay” trailer was actually a video they had made and asked someone to pretend to play. It wa🦩s not at all representative of what No Man’s Sky actually looked like. There were no space battles, and most of the aliens were mysteriously alone. What’s more, any discoveries you made and named (aside from the planet itself) would be wiped clean from the server after just two weeks! The list goes on and on. Arguably, the biggest disappointment w🐬as that no, you couldn’t meet other players in-game.

13 #Gamergate

2014 was not a great year for gamers and gaming in general. The Gamergate movement practically split the gaming co🙈mmunity in two; with accusations and misconceptions on both sides of the issue.

Gamergate started a❀s a small sex scand𓆏al surrounding Depression Quest developer Zoe Quinn. The rumors surrounding Zoe sparked a debate about the ethics of journalism, leading many to believe it was corrupt. Unfortunately, while some supporters of #Gamergate were genuinely concerned about this issue, the large majority of the movement was focused on harassing and demoralizing women in the gaming industry. Almost all of the targets of the movement were women, including outspoken youtube feminist Anita Sarkeesian. Anita and many of꧋ her peers had decried the harassment and Gamergate as a whole, leading to extreme harassment and threats of violence.

Many talented women, including developers and journalists, in the ga꧅ming industry, were chased out by the Gamergate 💟movement. Gamergate was a dark mark on gaming history, one that should never be repeated.

12 Amateur Hour (Mass Effect Andromeda)

It’ဣs no secret that the highly anticipated sequel to th꧂e Mass Effect series was a major disappointment. While it wasn’t all bad, the dead-eyed stares of the characters, incomp♕etent animations, and glitches ranging from hilarious to game breaking made the game practically unplayable. BioWare Montre𒊎al, the team in charge of Mass Effect Andromeda, did such a poor job with the game that it doesn’t even look like it released in 2017. Heck, t✃he original Mass Effect looks and plays better than the new game and that game is a decade old. Granted, Andromeda was BioWare Montreal's first title, but that isn't a very good excus🎉e.

The backlash against Andromeda was almost immediate. Critics and players alike panned the game. BioWare has been doing damage control ever since. Several patches helped to clear out a lot of the bugs and increased the quality of the animations and textures. But the damage was done. BioWare Montreal was downsized to a support studio. Many of the team members were moved to EA Motive, a sister studio. To top it all off, the entire Mass Effect series was placed on an indefinite hiatus.

11 The Konami And Kojima Breakup

Hideo Kojima was one of Konami’s best developers. He was the creator of the Metal Gear Solid franchise and worked a🐻t Konami for over three decades. Kojima was e⛄ven working on the upcoming Silent Hills. Yet, in 2015, the decades-long partnership between Konami and Kojima came to♏ a horrible end.

Shortly after the release of the wildly popular P.T., a playable trailer for Silent Hills, Konami announced that it was working on reconstructing the company internally.💎 While it wasn’t clear at the time what that meant, things quickly took a turn for the worse. Konami silently removed Kojima’s name from any promotional materials for Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain, and Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection. P.T. was pulled from the PlayStation Store and Silent Hills was canceled. Things came ಞto a head when Konami banned Kojima from accepting his own award at the 2015 Game Awards.

Konami didn’t get the last laugh. Eventually, Kojima formed his own company, taking many of Konami’s best developers w🌼ith him. Kojima even managed to get his award in the end.

10 Poor PC Port (Batman Arkham Knight)

Batman Arkham Knight was a great game — if you bought the conꦚsole version. The PC version was a complete nightmare.

The system requirements for the PC version were increased just hours before the game launched. Review copies of the game weren’t sent out until the day of launch, with a few notable exceptions. Rocksteady had capped the framerate for the game at 30 frames per second, and the game still suffered from massive framerate drops. Joe Lopez (aka Other Joe from the Angry Joe Show) equated the framerate drops to slow mo. Graphics o🎐n the PC version were noticeably inferior to the console versions. Textures would fail so spectacularly that I’ve seen N64 games that looked better. Additionally, if certain features were enabled, it would cause the game to flicker and stutter. Plus, the PC version of Arkham Knight was prone to crashing.

Rocksteady eventually pulled Arkham Knight from Steam and issued full refunds for anyone who had purchased the PC version. Eventually, an improved made its way back onto Steam. But, let's be honest, it shouldn't have come ou🅺t that way in the first place.

9 No Microtransactions? No way. (Payday 2)

No one likes microtransactions. They are an evil that began with arcades but was mostly forgotten until the Xbox 360's marketplace tookജ the world by storm. From there, it was onl🥀y a matter of time before our $60 AAA titles started supporting those vile things. While microtransactions are understandable in freemium games, they do not belong in full titles. So when the developers of Payday 2 announced that there w🐻ould be no microtransactions in their game, everyone was thrilled. If 👍only it had lasted.

It didn’t take long for O🦩verkill to break that promise. Microtransactions manage🅘d to find their way into Overkill 2 after all. What’s more, a lot of gamers argued t💛hat they created a pay-to-win scenario. Many of the items available had better stats than those that could be found through normal gameplay. Other players argued that, since the game was a one player game, the microtransactions didn’t real🐟ly break the game (even if they were sleazy). Eventually, Seabreeze obtained the rights to Payday 2 and removed the microtransactions from the game on🧜ce and for all.

8 On Disk DLC (Street Fighter X Tekken)

Speaking of microtransactions, Street Fighter X Tekken managed to get itself into some really hot water because of its DLC. The game launched on the PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 3, and the Xbox 360. However, 12 of the fighters were semi-exclusive to the Vita. They were available for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions, but only as DLC. Many of these char𝓡acters were fan-favorites like Pac-Man, Guy, and Elena.

The DLC locked characters, while obnoxious, weren’t what got Capcom into trouble. No, the real trouble started when hackers discovered that all of the locked characters were actually programmed onto the game disk. Full models, prologues, and endings were available on the disk, just locked behind a paywall. Capcom defended their decision by claiming that it was to help increase compatibility between games. But, come on, we're not stupid. Unsurprisingly, this didn't goꦅ over well with fans. I don’t blame them one bit either. Street Fighter X Tekken was a flagrant example of a game that was chopped up just to earn the developers a little extra cash at🌟 the expense of the gamer.

7 Kickstarting Anger (Godus)

Kickstarter is both a b𒈔lessing and a curse. Spiritual success🍎ors like Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night and Yooka-Laylee managed to find their footing th꧟rough crowdfundi🌳ng. Smaller games like Shovel Knight and Hyper Light Drifter wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for Kickstarter. Unfortuna🍬tely for us, not everything that shows up on Kickstarter has a happy ending.

Pe🌼ter Molyneux, lead developer of 22 Cans, started a Kickstarter page for Godus. The game was meant to be a god simulator, turning players into ℱgods of their own, personal, digital universes. They even created a mobile gamꦐe called Curiosity to help promote Godus. Curiosity was an MMO that featured a single, gigantic cube made from 25 billion cubelets. Players raced to be the person that destroyed꧟ that final cubelet and gain a “life changing” prize. The eventual winner was promised they would become, as Molynuex put it, “the God of all people that are playing Godus.” Except that didn’t happen. After near silence, Godus was eventually rele🅠ased for mobile despite the promises that the PC 💛version would be 22 Cans’ number one priority.

After raising $800,000, Godus was handed over to a mobile developer in its unfinished state and Peter Molyneux movedꩲ on to🌳 a new project. Godus became the staple for everything wrong with Kickstart⛦er.

6 Match Fixing (Starcraft II)

Esports are great. No, Esports are fantastic! It combines the world of jocks with your mother's basement to create the ultimate test of a gamer’s skill and teamwor♌k. Starcraft II is one of the biggest games in Esports, with t🌄he Koreans dominating the leaderboards. Two of the best Starcraft players, Lee “Life” Seung Hyun and Bung “Bbyong” Woo Yong, managed to curb stomp everyone’s hopes an🍸d dr꧟eams.

Life and Bbyong, along with seven other indi🙈viduals, were convicted of match-fixing. Many were investors and gambling brokers. In this case, Hyun intentionally threw two matches. Gambling brokers paid Life and Bbyong to throw these matches in order to game betting pools. What’s💖 more, a series of employees would go to various betting sites and place small bets to help ensure that they made a profit. With this, I guess Starcraft really has become a sport, cheating and all.