Mis Blamed / Video Games

• Electronic Arts
• Nintendo

General

• This happens all the time, with fans assuming that the publishers were the ones who made the game, often ignoring the developers. The problems are exacerbated by the fact that many game publishers also develop games in-house as well.
• Many fans don't realize this but in China, many foreign video game studios are not directly involved in the localization and management of their games for the region (unless the studio is owned by a Chinese company). Instead, the Chinese versions are run by local companies working more like franchisees or license-holders instead of subsidiaries. As such, companies Wargaming and Blizzard have little say in the complaints of Chinese gamers regarding World of Tanks and World of Warcraft.
• Developers aren't always to blame for controversial decisions like the implementation of DRM, DLC, and/or microtransactions. Such things are just as often mandated by the publisher during the game's development.
  • Since the dawn of DLC, developers/publishers have had to contend with accusations of deliberately cutting content from the base game with the intent of selling it later as a cheap cash-grab. While these accusations aren't unwarranted at times — Street Fighter X Tekken was infamously discovered by dataminers to have the data for its numerous DLC already be on the disc — this isn't always the case, with many games only beginning work on DLC content after the base game has finished production.
  • A game that uses Denuvo for DRM piracy protection will always have performance issues. Not so. While this can be the case, it is generally either because of how Denuvo was implemented into the game's code rather than the software itself, or the game itself not being well optimized to begin with. This is not helped by the fact that figuring out whether Denuvo is to blame requires an understanding of a given game's code to a degree that even modders may not fully have.
• Video game localization and translation is host to two major ones:
  • The liberties taken with early translations of Japanese games are frequently assumed to have just been a case of publishers thinking that Viewers Are Morons. This isn't completely the case; many of the choices that were made, in addition to attempts to make it work better for the new audience, were often the result of storage space limitations. Japanese text just takes up far less space than Latin script, so even if translators wanted to be as faithful as possible to the source material, they simply couldn't due to the game's UI or even the cartridge itself not having the necessary room. And that's without getting into how little time translators had to do their jobs even up to The Sixth Generation of Console Video Games, meaning some alterations could also be simple mistakes they didn't have time to correct. Finally, when translating games, one also has to be wary of expressions that don't make much sense outside of the author's local culture (such as pop culture references), and make a choice between either leaving it as-is and confusing the audience they're translating for or forcing them to read outside-of-script footnotes, or make up new expressions that the target audience will understand better.
  • Content getting "censored" for certain regions isn't always due to the publisher being puritanical. Different regions have different ratings boards with their own standards, meaning that if a publisher wants to remain an equivalent age rating overseas, some content needs to be altered to achieve that. And yes, this is usually in the form of sexual and/or violent material. This can even happen to re-releases or remakes of games in the same region if the rating board has changed standards during the interim.
• If you can't play [X] game on [Y] system, it isn't simply the case of the publisher or hardware manufacturers being "lazy". There are many reasons why one game or another can't simply be dragged and dropped onto another piece of hardware; the most common being licensing/ownership agreements (especially for older titles) and the game itself just not being programmed for system in question. The latter is precisely why Backwards Compatibility for older titles is more often than not done via emulation: each new platform a game is developed for often needs to be tweaked for that specific platform, and this was especially the case prior to The Eighth Generation of Console Video Games, where each console had vastly different hardware specifications.
• Annual sport games in general such as Madden NFL, FIFA Soccer, NBA 2K & MLB: The Show are criticized for the full-priced roster updates, despite the fact sports' themselves cannot change from year to year (aside for the gameplay, graphics and physics adjustments).
• Whenever a game uses licensed assets such as the soundtrack, the game itself, or even something as mild as Product Placement, it's easy for people to point fingers at the publishers for removing them when it gets rereleased, or for a Streamer-Friendly Mode muting the audio. This is actually because the owners of the licensed asset(s) need to give their consent, and they usually don't consent to streaming since it can result in them needing to file a claim to protect their trademark.
• Why aren't arcades really a thing anymore? A lot of people who grew up with 90s arcades are quick to blame rising costs of credits (with the most notable increase being from 25 US cents to 50) or the proliferation of Arcade-Perfect Ports. The actual reasons are a bit more complicated than that:
  • In the mid-90s, advancements in video game console technology allowed for developers to make more long-format games with extensive stories beyond "the bad guys are doing things, the good guys must stop them!" and more cinematic storytelling. Games like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy VII demonstrated that games could be used to tell stories in a manner reminiscent of big-budget films; you're not going to be seeing someone sit at an arcade for a 30-hour story-heavy adventure. These became the sort of games that many gamers began to seek out rather than just gameplay-focused games that are all about getting points or just discovering and beating the next level; furthermore, these games often feature lower difficulty than arcade games' infamous "quarter-muncher" difficulty, making them palatable to a wider audience. As a consequence, the demand for arcade-style experiences diminished, to the point where even when arcade games did get perfect ports on consoles, they generally ended up being passed over and not selling as much as those AAA heavy-narrative games, with Fighting Games being the exception due to their competitive scene (now the Fighting Game Community can have setups at homes and non-arcade public venues, and later the introduction of online play allowed players to have matches any time they want).
  • The increasing cost to play one credit of an arcade game is often explained as "arcade operators are greedy" and "the death of arcades." While this might be the case with some owners, arcades are still businesses, with all the operating expenses and need to turn a profit to stay in business that entail, like utilities (espeically since arcade cabs use a lot of electricity), buying cabinets, employee wages and salaries, and rent. Factor in inflation in many countries, and as a result, raising the cost to play a credit ends up being a necessity for many arcades. Regardless of pricing, many arcades that aren't attached to multi-entertainment centers (the kind to have restaurants, bowling alleys, pool tables, party rooms, playgrounds, and the like) or bars (also known as "barcades"), end up going out of business because they just couldn't keep up with the costs anymore. In short, while it is true that raising the cost to play an arcade game turned off some customers, it's mostly due to being an effect of unfortunate circumstances rather than a cause of them. Many indie/small-business dedicated arcades that crop up in the 2010s and beyond with a focus on the "hardcore" crowd, often fighting game and Rhythm Game players, end up closing within a year or two even if they charge what many gamers consider a fair price for an arcade game credit.

Square Enix

• Because Nintendo is the co-publisher for the non-Japanese releases of Bravely Second, some people blamed them for the changes made to the localization. Nintendo themselves later came out and said the changes to things like how side quests play out were actually made by Square-Enix, and it was because Japanese players complained about the way the side quests played out in the original release. Some people also used Nintendo of America's Treehouse division as an easy scapegoat in light of controversy surrounding the localization of Fire Emblem Fates, but the localization company for Bravely Second is actually an Italian company named Binari Sonori.
• Many Chrono Trigger fans were angered that the Nintendo DS remake's English script was less faithful to the original game. While this is true if you compare the script to the prior English localization, this isn't the case when compared directly to the original Japanese. The prior localization had several Woolseyisms like Frog speaking Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe that weren't in the original Japanese, and thus weren't included in the revised localization.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Those who are fond of the original mythology surrounding Bahamut place the blame on Final Fantasy for popularizing the idea of the entity being a dragon in popular culture. While the video game series certainly didn't help, the actual credit for "Bahamut as a dragon" actually goes to Dungeons & Dragons, which introduced the character as such in the 1970s and features him in several campaigns.
  • Tetsuya Nomura in general tends to be hold the blame for whatever problems a given Final Fantasy game has. However, his main role in that series is as a character designer. While he has held roles as a producer or director on a handful of Final Fantasy titles, it as only ever been for spin-offs and remakes; when it comes to the mainline entries, you'll see him listed as one of the character designers.
  • When Tetsuya Nomura announced in 2017 that they'd scrapped all work on Final Fantasy VII Remake and were starting over, FF7 fans assumed developer CyberConnect2, who had been contracted to co-develop the game and had left the project earlier that year, was the source of the problems leading to this decision. It was actually Nomura's attention being split between multiple projects that was the problem, with his delays regarding aspects of the game he was meant to be directly overseeing serving as a hindrance to CyberConnect2, who left due to the constant stalling affecting their financial health. As an extension of this, the "scrapped all work" statement only refers to elements that were being done in-house; everything CyberConnect2 made for the remake would still be present in the final release.
  • Final Fantasy X has the infamous "laughing scene", in which Tidus and Yuna loudly and awkwardly laugh. The moment is often held up as an example of terrible English dubbing by people who have never played the game, but that's due to the scene often being shared out of context. The voice actors and directors are doing their job perfectly: not only do they sound just as fake and over-the-top in the original Japanese, but the fakeness is the entire point of that scene. The lead-in is Yuna trying to cheer Tidus up and teach him how to feign happiness when he's feeling sad. However, Tidus is unable to do so convincingly and knows what he's about to do will be incredibly awkward. Yuna then deliberately imitates his fake laugh for fun, after which they both break into genuine laughter at how ridiculous they sound, and the rest of the party approaches wondering if they'd finally lost it.
  • Final Fantasy XV:
    • Hajime Tabata, who had previously directed other Darker and Edgier entries in the franchise such as Crisis Core and Final Fantasy Type-0, wasn't the one who decided upon this game's tone. It was Nomura and Yoshinori Kitase, who originally headed the project back when it was intended to be a spin-off.
    • Nomura was once again considered to have been the one who designed the characters. This is actually only half true - a good portion of characters (namely Umbra, Ardyn, and most notably Cindy) were designed by Roberto Ferrari.
    • Cindy's original appearance in a trailer depicted her with rather unusual breast physics, which were toned down for the final product. This was actually requested by Tabata, not the Western localization team.
  • A lot of people claim that Final Fantasy Adventure, the first game in the World of Mana series, is a Dolled-Up Installment of the original Seiken Densetsu made to cash in on Final Fantasy's name power. Except the game's original Japanese title is Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden; the Mana series began life as a Final Fantasy spin-off.^note These people may be thinking of the Final Fantasy Legend series, which are retitled versions of the unrelated SaGa games.
  • Many fans believed that Final Fantasy Mystic Quest was created as an American replacement for Final Fantasy V, which helped contribute to unfortunate amounts of hate for the game. In truth, the decision not to translate Final Fantasy V was completely unrelated to the creation of Mystic Quest.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Tetsuya Nomura tends to get most of the blame for the series' perceived Kudzu Plot, due to being the series director, but he is far from the only writer. Other writers for the games have included Jun Akiyama, Daisuke Watanabe, Kazushige Nojima, Masaru Oka, and Tomoco Kanemaki, to name a few.
  • The various "Final Mix" Updated Rereleases of Kingdom Hearts titles being No Export for You was thought to be a decision by Nomura. In reality, he has nothing to do with whether a game he's worked on gets to be localized for international audiences or not.
  • The development of Kingdom Hearts III has quite a bit of this. The prolonged development had less to do with Nomura and more to do with decisions made by Square Enix higher-ups and Pixar; the former forced the team to switch to a different game engine partway through development, resulting in them having to scrap everything and restart, while the latter took a year to sign-off on the use of their characters, delaying development on those parts of the game. Meanwhile, some of the Disney worlds (particularly Tangled and Frozen) being straightforward retellings of the source material rather than new stories was due to Disney having stricter rules on how some characters could be portrayed over others.
• Live A Live received a 2022 remake whose localization saw many accusations of Bowdlerization. However, the majority of the examples brought up are the result of the original fan translation(s) being a case of Spice Up the Subtitles. For example, the fan translation had Odie talk about how he killed of all Masaru's opponents in gruesome and violent ways, while the original Japanese merely has him state he killed them in cold blood, with no mention of his methods. Ironically, the remake added much more vulgar language and uses of *Bleep*-dammit! than existed in the SNES original.
  • While there are some instances of the localization toning down some content for Western audience, some of the examples pointed out by fans are actually alterations that were present in the Japanese version as well. For instance, the alcoholic beverages and cigars that served as healing items in the original SNES version's Wild West chapter were replaced with miracle tonics and strips of jerky, while Akira sending Watanabe to steal Taeko's panties was replaced with him trying to steal Taeko's secret stash of pocket money.
• Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals: Square Enix got the blame for several divisive aspects about this 2010 remake of Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, particularly the updated character designs, changes to the story, and the switch to being an Action RPG. However, while Square Enix was the Japanese publisher and funded development, many of these changes were decided upon by developer Neverland (the studio that developed almost every Lufia game prior, including Lufia II), with the remake's staff including several people who worked on the original.
• Many fans of Parasite Eve have expressed annoyance solely at Square Enix for not dong a remake or a HD Remaster of the game. The decision to do such projects wouldn't just lie with Square Enix however; Parasite Eve is actually a licensed game based off of a popular Japanese novel and film. If Square Enix wants to do anything new with the property, they would need to renegotiate the license. This is also the reason why the third entry in the series was called The Third Birthday rather than "Parasite Eve", as they don't fully own the series.
• In regards to the company's representation in Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. series, it was commonly thought that Cloud only came with two music tracks for his stage when he was released as a Smash 4 DLC character because Square Enix was being oddly being stingy. Smash series creator Masahiro Sakurai would later explain that the lack of music was actually due to rights issues, as ownership of the game's music was split between multiple holders, making it hard to obtain permission to use them within that original time-frame; Ultimate was able to include far more tracks when adding Sephiroth a few years later.
• Trials of Mana: There was a long-standing urban legend that the Trials English localization was scrapped in favor of creating Secret of Evermore for North American audiences, which resulted in the latter becoming a source of disdain. Secret of Evermore had nothing to do with that decision, being created by an American team of developers hired specifically for that game. The actual reason for Trials not being localized was simply because of hardware limitations; there wasn't enough room left on the cartridge for English text. Not to mention that the Nintendo 64 was right around the corner; by the time they'd be able to get all the localization issues sorted out, the newer console would already be on the market, hurting the game's potential sales.
• When the first three SaGa games were rereleased as "Collection of SaGa", some translation errors were fixed, but the "Colt" weapon was replaced with a "Pistol" weapon. Gamers cried Bowdlerisation, but it was actually due to legal concerns. "Colt" is actually the name of a Real Life firearm manufacturer, subject to Brand Name Takeover.

Others

• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial often gets single-handed blame for The Great Video Game Crash of 1983. Often pointing to the game's quality blaming it for poor sales evidenced by the massive returns and subsequent dumping of copies in a desert landfill. This was more due to an issue with quantity. The game actually was one of the best selling games on the 2600, selling a million copies which for the time was pretty good. However, Atari vastly overestimated the expected sales and produced more copies than the number of 2600s that had been sold resulting in retailers sending back a massive amount of unsold copies. E.T. wasn't the only game as well. The Pac-Man port itself was one of the games dumped into the landfill again because Atari vastly overestimated the sales, despite selling an impressive 7 million copies, Atari still was stuck with millions more copies that were unsold. While Atari was a big factor in the crash, overall it had to do with other factors such as an over-saturation of poor titles flooding the market, competition with home computers, inflation, and loss of publishing control. To sum up: While E.T. certainly was a contributing factor to the crash, it was quite far from being the reason.
  • Nolan Bushnell often gets thrown in for blame, despite being forced out of Atari and the industry in 1978, four years before either of those games were released.
• As it turns out, Superman 64's glaring faults and ridiculous storyline were mandated by the license holders, meaning that most of the errors weren't Titus' fault, as shown by ProtonJon's LP (opening of level 4).
  • It's really hard to tell how much of this is blame-shifting, though footage of the beta, superior to the final product, supports his claims of a rushed deadline.
• The English translation of Castlevania II: Simon's Quest for the NES is almost infamous for its poor translation, like blatant in-game lies supposedly meant to tell you what your next goal is, how to reach that goal, and other such game-critical information. For years, fans thought the translation was to blame, but the original version was actually just as incomprehensible.
  • Yes, even the infamous "graveyard duck" is not a mistranslation. As pointed out in a comment on the GameSpite blog, the corresponding line in the Japanese version uses the word "ahiru", which can only refer to the bird.
  • The apparent idea behind the quotes in the Japanese version was that all the villagers were liars — that is to say, they all said false things that players were supposed to realise were silly. However, when you have no other clues or information to go by, not to mention a lack of grammatical context in such small text boxes, both Japanese and English audiences started to wonder why the game was telling you to shout in front of a church to restore health instead of just going inside to heal. In fact, given that the Famicom controller had a microphone built into it, the Japanese probably had it worse...
    • Some of the townsfolk tell you things like what Dracula's rib does or where you can find some of the thirteen "scriptures" which explain what to do at the impassable cliffs and lakes etc. One villager tells you how to get through the poison marsh, another that you must get the cross at Laruba's Mansion... Not everything is useless or lies, and the manual does warn you that some of it is. Talking to some of the townspeople is also necessary in order to find out which ones sell you items. The dialogue sets the tone for the atmosphere and type of people you encounter in each town, deepening the game, and some of the utterances are quite funny, adding to the entertainment value. Also you know you're getting nearer the end when the townsfolk are more scared in the towns you come across, which is a useful clue and adds to the ambience as well.
• Some Super Robot Wars fans get huffy over Atlus's translation of some Original Generation pilot and unit names, specifically regarding "Zengar Zonvolt" becoming "Sanger Zonvolt" and his Infinity Plus One Mech Daizengar becoming the rather silly-looking DyGenGuard. These two instances actually make sense: for Sanger's name, Atlus simply left off the umlaut on Sänger, which is a German name and naturally katakana-tized as Zengar due to how it's pronounced. As for DyGenGuard, it's short for Dynamic General Guardian. The whole Daizengar ("Great Sänger") bit was an intentional pun, again due to Japanese pronunciation. Atlus's only fault in this was being lazy with their accent marks.
  • "Latooni Subota", on the other hand, probably ought to be Latune Cybota to stay faithful to typical Cyrillic transliteration (she's Russian. Ish.) Basically, Atlus is perfectly faithful to Japanese. It's European languages that they half-ass.
  • Meanwhile, strange Romanizations like "Hagwane" were preserved in the official sub of the anime at Bandai's insistence, as was a lengthy joke in the game Original Generation 2 that no longer makes sense when the names are pronounced in the English way. These could be considered cases of a translation being too faithful to the original work.
• Tales Series
  • Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World was yelled at by fans who complained about how "they took the wimpy way out with the bad ending" and instead of Marta killing herself, she just writes a sad letter. Marta didn't commit suicide, that was a mistranslation...but the Heroic Sacrifice of Emil was still there, as was Marta's Disney Death, and her Tear Jerker cry of EEMMMMIIIIIIIIIILLLLL!!!!
  • Many people blamed the translation team for Tales of Legendia not having any voicing at all in the second half of the game. Actually, they were not given the money to pay the voice actors for the second half, and were told it was an optional piece of the game.
  • When Tales of Phantasia finally got an official English release, many people complained about various edits and changes made to the game script. Actually, many of the differences were a result of an earlier Fan Translation by DeJap of the SNES version being less faithful to the original than the official GBA version. Of course, there's still that thing about "Ragnarok" becoming "Kangaroo" (as well as generally being a pretty bland localization and some consistency issues with the Tales of Symphonia translation), but despite what anyone says that's pretty much the only outright mistake.
    • There was still some sexual humor in the original Japanese (like Arche's infamous sex dream about Cless — which is still in the GBA translation, albeit in a more subtle, less blatantly obscene form — and Arche admiring Mint's figure in the hot springs,) but DeJap was far less subtle about presenting it, as well as ramping up Arche's pervertedness (also, Arche apparently fucks like a tiger).
• While Capcom does have a well-earned reputation for bad translations of games in the '90s, they are sometimes blamed for some they didn't do. In the case of the Breath of Fire series, they are often accused of creating an Inconsistent Dub due to certain names in the first game being altered in later entries. This was actually the result of the first game being localized in the US by Squaresoft, who changed names with little rhyme or reason. The later games were handled by Capcom and they usually reverted to the Japanese names in future titles.
  • More specifically, Capcom USA has been the subject of a lot of heat for their English translations of the company's Japanese-developed games, which typically mangle not only the dialogue but also the canon for some games, Street Fighter in particular. A revelation from former Capcom USA Senior Vice President, however, reveals that Capcom of Japan is responsible for the botched English translations that made their way overseas for years. Which begs the question of why a Japanese company would mix-up the translation of dialogue and plot written in their native language just for outsiders.
    • One has to consider that some of the Street Fighter games from the mid-to-late 1990s had American staff members working on them, so they had more input. However, most of the quotes and endings in the games, while a bit embellished sometimes (Guile never mentions Cambodia or Charlie in the Japanese version), had mostly accurate translations. Endings that were truly different, like Cammy's and Fei Long's, were often the exceptions rather than the rule.
• The Angry Video Game Nerd's review of the NES port of Metal Gear involved him complaining about butchery of a 'great game'. Among the features he complained about were the fact that you can't open a door and wear your gas mask at the same time, forcing you to sacrifice some health when you enter or leave a gassy room, which was a design flaw of the original game not really fixed until Metal Gear Solid 2. He also complained about Big Boss prefacing his misleading hints with the phrase 'I forgot to tell you...', claiming it was a terrible translation — not only was this a better translation than the one in the European MSX version of the game, but Big Boss's hints really were supposed to be useless and annoying for plot reasons, similar to the Castlevania "graveyard duck" hint.
• Again, one of the many complaints lodged against Snake's Revenge is that the translation tells you the opposite of what you have to do during the train level ("THERE IS NO TRAP ON THE TRAIN" has become a semi-meme). Of course, the sequence was a deliberate callback to Metal Gear since it happens immediately before the person giving you the hints turns out to be a spy trying to make you fail, who you then fight in a boss battle.
  • Also, a lot of Metal Gear fans who never actually play the NES version of the game accuse it of having a silly plot in comparison to the "serious" storyline in the original MSX2 version, replacing the original Big Bad of Big Boss, an American soldier turned renegade mercenary, with Vermon CaTaffy, a pastiche of real-life dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi. In truth, Konami's American manuals back in the day tended to feature weird plot changes (as evident by the American manuals for the early Castlevania, Contra, and Gradius games) that thankfully did not affect the games themselves. The NES version of Metal Gear, despite its "Blind Idiot" Translation quality, is almost identical to the MSX2 version in terms of plot aside for a few minor differences and Big Boss is still the Big Bad in the NES version. The non-canon Snake's Revenge also featured a similar discrepancy between the game and its manual, with the manual identifying the bad guy as Higharolla Kockamamie (another pastiche, this time of Ayatollah Khomeini), but the actual villain of the game is revealed to be a cyborg Big Boss.
• Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes often gets a lot of scorn for its cutscenes, most of the blame is directed towards Ryuhei Kitimura, who directed the scenes. However, every scene that Kitimura included was approved by Hideo Kojima, and Kitimura was chosen specifically for his over-the-top nature (Kitimura himself originally intended to make a much more faithful adaptation of the source material, but changed it when Kojima himself rejected his initial rendition of the Hind-D fight cutscenes and requested that he instead do it in his trademark over-the-top style).
• Many people who played the fan-translated version of Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake assumed that the name of the enemy boss "Black Color", a misromanization of "Blackcollar", was a mistake by the fan translators. In reality, that's how it was spelled in the actual Japanese version (all of the bosses' names in the game were written in roman script).
  • Metal Gear Solid 2 also gets a lot of blame for its rather absurd storyline placed on the translator/localizer, Agness Kaku. As this interview reveals, saying that Konami was very unhelpful with regards to translation and localization is a huge understatement.
• 80's elitists of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are angry at Ubisoft for not including any 80's cartoon characters in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash Up. The truth is, the people at Mirage Studios specifically told Ubisoft to stick to the 2003 series as the basis for the game. In fact, Ubisoft actually defied that directive and stuck the Technodrome in as a background object in one of the stages.
• Some people thought that Loom was uncompleted for several reasons...either a), because Star Wars games made more money, or b) nobody bought it. The actual reason for not finishing Loom is way different. No, LucasArts didn't abandon it in favour of Star Wars...this was in the early 90s when point and click adventure games like Loom were all the rage and cash cows, especially when the Nostalgia Filter kicked in about 10 years later. And the sale figures certainly were not showing lack of public interest...Even one of the developers said it wasn't. Loom sold over 500,000 copies at the time of the interview - at a time when that was very impressive. But why was there no Loom 2: Forge despite that Lucas Arts would only benefit from another one, and fans would support it? The developers all got caught-up in different projects.
• The Circle of Eight mod for The Temple of Elemental Evil garnered complaints from fans for including a Buster Sword. The sword model was actually in the core game, used by a bugged sword that can only be accessed by console.
• While it is true that MLB, NFL, and the other leagues forced Backyard Sports to keep going, some reviewers put the blame on the leagues for making the series Jump the Shark by taking the games in a different direction. It wasn't even Atari, the publishing company, who did it. The real culprit is Humongous, Inc., a company formed out of the last remnants of Humongous Entertainment (who started the series); an employee said so in an interview.
  • Similarly, a lot of people like to blame Atari for the two 2003 Junior Adventures being unfaithful to the predecessors and being plagued with certain faults. The truth of the matter here is Atari was only their parent company at the time, and Humongous hadn't even gone bankrupt yet — that happened two years later. They were actually made after half of the Humongous workforce was laid off, and they still had yet to recover from deep financial trouble, this the reason the voice acting was subpar.
• Valve was complained at for breaking a promise to release something for Team Fortress 2 on November 11th, 2009, which was also Veteran's Day. Only Valve never even hinted at the possibility of anything being released anytime that week. People started thinking Valve was going to do something, and people jumped on the bandwagon.
  • The Cold Stream DLC had been delayed for several months, causing Xbox 360 players to blame Valve for delaying the DLC for so long and demand that they should be allowed to help in testing the beta for free or release the DLC for free. Valve isn't entirely without fault, but the rest of the blame falls on Microsoft. Not only Valve has to make sure Cold Stream can run on the Xbox 360 without trouble, but Microsoft's DLC policies prevent Valve from giving Xbox 360 owners constant updates for a beta product and it is Microsoft that determines the pricing for DLC, not Valve.
• The fact that Conker's Bad Fur Day (amongst other demanded games) isn't on the Wii's Virtual Console seems to lead to people pointing fingers at Nintendo. One would honestly think that fans would actually be bothered to look at the developer and publishers for the Nintendo 64 game... Rare. Sure, they were second-party at the time of Conker's Bad Fur Day, but in 2002, they were bought out by Microsoft. Which is why there is a Conker game on the Xbox, not to mention Kameo: Elements of Power and Perfect Dark Zero as launch titles, and the original Perfect Dark later rereleased on Xbox Live Arcade. Nintendo had no involvement with Conker's Bad Fur Day.
  • This, compounded by throwing Activision into the mix as well (as they owned the James Bond video game license throughout that console generation), is also the reason why GoldenEye (1997) was not re-released for over twenty five years. every attempt ended with one or more of the three parties refusing whatever the current plan was, Hence Activision choosing to remake the game instead.
• A different company was responsible for developing Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier, which is why it (the plot, mostly) gained so much ire from the fans. However, if one would take time to watch the credits, one would find that those responsible for the story were the series' original creators. However, the same original creator had already worked on the title 3-4 years before its eventual release, before scrapping the project. Clearly someone realised their efforts would be best spent elsewhere.
• A common complaint about Capcom's localization of the Ace Attorney series is the claim that despite the games being centered around murder mysteries and not shy about depicting brutal killings (including one impalement), there are frequent references to "grape juice" which appear to be an obvious Bowdlerization of wine. Oddly enough, it's grape juice in the Japanese version as well.
• LJN Toys has taken a lot of bad reaction (such as from The Angry Video Game Nerd) for the terrible video games that they've put their name on, but in reality the number of games they developed in-house can probably be counted on one hand. While they were clearly doing something wrong (likely forcing development schedules that were way too short) to have such a large amount of bad licensed games in their catalogue, according to Lord Kat in his video on the Who Framed Roger Rabbit NES game, the actual main culprit may be surprising:
  "Now a lot of people associate these terrible movie-based licensed games with LJN, [but] they're just the publishers. The real criminals here are the beloved Rare. A Nightmare on Elm Street, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Amazing Spider-Man, Beetlejuice... In fact, if you take out the LJN component, Rare has made a lot more garbage without them. So to all you Nintendo fanboys who cream themselves over Battletoads and Donkey Kong 64, kiss my fat wide ass; Rare ruined my childhood."
  • Some of LJN's games pre-Rare were developed in Japan by a then mostly unknown company called... Atlus.
  • The Friday the 13th game was developed by Japanese VHS distributor Pack-In Video, which also made Die Hard, Rambo, and Predator games.
  • The Angry Video Game Nerd addressed the publishing issue in Episode 121: "Beetlejuice".
• Xbox Live's userbase has been misblamed for the creation of the "juvenile and unfriendly" gamer. Within Xbox Live Arcade, games like Halo and Call of Duty get disproportionately blamed for this. Apparently people haven't heard of the theory of G.I.F.T, which has been in existence long before the Xbox. Live just brought the issue to light if anything. And when it's not Xbox Live that gets all the criticism for this, it's always something like Counter-Strike or Quake.
• Whenever you mention Gold-selling in-game advertisements or gold farmers, most people will think of World of Warcraft, but the practice is not exclusive to it and certainly did not start with that game. It's been around since Ultima Online, and was present in the original EverQuest and Ragnarok Online. The reason you hear about it in World of Warcraft so much is because the game has a huge, and unusually mainstream, playerbase. If you check some of the largest gold-selling websites you can see that they offer gold for many other games, Warhammer Online had Gold spammers from day one, as did Aion Online. On some servers of Final Fantasy XI, you almost had to buy gold. Not even RuneScape was immune to it!
• Class nerfs are always a source of utmost ire in any MMO, but among the World of Warcraft fanbase, most nerfs would usually be blamed on Greg "Ghostcrawler" (until he left the company) or a few other choice developers, when in fact the changes are discussed between the entire development team well in advance. The CMs (community managers) also get a ton of hate for changes; while ghostcrawler at least worked on the game, most of the CMs are just forum moderators who (try to) keep the boards a place of intelligent discussion and not constant flaming and fighting.
• World of Warcraft's Cataclysm expansion was plagued at the start by all sorts of bugs and glitches, among them a near ridiculous respawn rate where a mob you just killed would respawn while you were looting it or suddenly reappear attacking you while you were walking away. This was apparently Blizzard's intention; but in actuality it was a programming oversight made to avert one of the things that had happened around Burning Crusade where the mob respawn rates were actually too high and people would camp required mobs.
• Game Masters/Moderators in almost any online game tend to get blamed for every single occurrence that rubs any player the wrong way and are expected to fix every technical problem and rectify every balance issue on their own.
• The North American version of the Death Smiles Xbox 360 port got a lot of flak for having less slowdown than the Japanese versions, and some decided to point fingers at Aksys Games, who did the localization. In a forum post on the official Aksys website, an Aksys employee clarified that all of the programming for the North American version—the reduced slowdown included—was Cave's doing.
• Tim Schafer is a Type 5 and Type 2 for Brütal Legend. Double Fine has received nearly all the blame for "falsely advertising" Brutal Legend and hiding the hybrid of Action and Real-Time Strategy. One angry player messaged Tim Schafer directly on Twitter and called him a liar publicly. He told the complainer that was all he talked about for months. It was Electronic Arts' advertising that mislead consumers (and reviewers) to believe it was single player focused, to the point that it drowned out the voice of Double Fine. To this day, Tim Schafer says that the reviews remain high on Metacritic, and can be divided between those who ATTEMPTED multiplayer, and those who didn't even touch it.
• Richard Garriott gets Misblamed for a lot of things surrounding "Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa", despite his role merely being Executive Producer. It's often claimed that he arrogantly decided to plaster his name on the box, when it was more likely a marketing decision to hype up a game that wasn't very famous and had been sitting in Development Hell for some years. He's often insulted and blamed for many of game's problems due to him going to space during the game's life. Not only did he pay for the flight with his own money, but his Executive Producer role was probably hardly missed during the trip, and the trip ended up being tied into a marketing campagin anyway, which arguably did help the game (though clearly not enough). Finally, Richard Garriott ended up suing the publisher, NC Soft themselves, after a letter of resignation came out that he claimed he didn't write and was forged by them to pressure him into leaving without an investment he was due. He won the case.
• Hideaki Itsuno, who is credited as director in all the Devil May Cry sequels, is often seen as the quintessential example of a game designer redeeming himself in the eyes of his fans due to how he seemingly recovered from the failure of Devil May Cry 2 by working on its two Surprisingly Improved Sequels. In reality, Itsuno had little involvement with DMC2, as he was assigned to the project late during development to salvage what he could after the previous director was fired by Capcom.
  • The much reviled redesign of Dante in DmC: Devil May Cry has caused a lot fan outrage. Nearly all of it was directed at Ninja Theory (who Capcom handed the series for said reboot's production), but Ninja Theory is only partly responsible, as the redesign was done at Capcom's request and approval. Sadly, lead designer Tameem Antoniades' response to the fans has done little to diffuse this situation.
• The translators of Ōkami are often blamed for the bizarre dichotomy that the manual for the game treats Amaterasu as genderless, while the actual game makes her fairly clearly female. Apparently, this was also the case in the Japanese version.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • The 4Kids Entertainment voice actors used to be mainly trashed for the crappy scripts, story-lines, and general badness of the bad Sonic games from 2005-2010. This, however, is an extremely unfair judgement seeing as how Jason Griffith and the other actors only provided the voices for these parts and never even involved in writing the stories or scripts. All they did was voice the lines they were given.
    • A key example of this the the infamous line: "It looks like being a princess isn't that easy" from Sonic 2006. Jason was trashed like hell for this line. Not the script writers or the translators, but just him.
  • Roger Craig Smith tends to receive a good amount of criticism for his deeper voice for Sonic compared to the more youthful sounding performances of Ryan and Jason. However, as Roger himself states in an interview, the older sounding performance was a deliberate move made by Sega, who wanted Sonic to sound older.
  • Sega themselves even stated once that they blame previous voice actor of Sonic, Ryan Drummond, for the fact that fans were complaining. While that is true written down, but given the context, the Sonic fanbase itself are overall the problem because of how toxic it can be to changes.
  • Another example: Now retired voice actor to Tails, Amy Palant, was reported to have been sent death threats after her role in Sonic 06. She apparently stated that the threats were based around the poor story and how Tails plays a crap role to which she stated she had no part in.
  • A non-dialogue related example is the creation of "Mobius". Many blame Sega of America for making such a place instead of staying true to the Japanese continuation, but the Sonic games were written with the intent of having a loose storyline; so that different regions can make their own versions of the story.
  • Dimps is not responsible for the odd-sounding music in the Sonic The Hedgehog 4; that would be Jun Senoue, who even then was disallowed from programming the music on an actual Genesis/Mega Drive due to Executive Meddling.
  • Ken Pontac and Warren Gruff tend to receive the blunt of criticism for the divisive shift in tone to a Denser and Wackier tone and shift in characterization in the games starting with Sonic Colors, even though they mostly only localize the stories written back over at Sonic Team and have no real influence on how the characters are written. Even the game they did write, Sonic Lost World, was written using a base outline given to them from Sega.
  • Continuing from this, some fans either praise or criticize Ian Flynn for all of the writing in Sonic Frontiers. It's worth noting that he's only one of three credited writers for the game, the other two being game director Morio Kishimoto and designer Jyunpei Ootsu, who likely determined the general direction the game would take, though you could still make the argument that Ian added some of his own personal touches.
• Contrary to popular belief, League of Legends actually does have different people working on different aspects of the game — most notably the champion designers, maintenance people, and the map designers. Whenever Riot announces a new champion, the cries are often "Why can't you fix the lag/servers?" or "Where's the Magma Chamber?".
• A case of a fan mis-blaming other fans, EPM's Let's Play of Mega Man Battle Network 1 criticized some players for not knowing what is a Program Advance (P.A.) on the reason that they didn't talk to NPCs who mentions about it all the time even to the point of telling them off they need to be spoonfed with P.A. tutorials. The problem is that it's not that they didn't know about what it is, they actually didn't know which Battle Chip combinations form what kind of P.A. at the first place, aside from the most basic combinations like ZetaCannon and LifeSword. To make matters worse some P.A.s might get carried over to the next game but require different chips. It's like the Harvest Moon recipes, except that you cannot find the specific chip combinations for most P.A.s within the games.
• Harvest Moon:
  • Fans often blame Natsume, who are simply the localizers and translators in the Americans, for certain problems that were present in the Japanese versions. However Natsume has such a bad rep because they've caused so many glitches with the games, they change parts of the games, and their translations are often butchered.
  • Harvest Moon: Light of Hope received a lot of criticism for being inferior to past console Harvest Moon titles. However, much of the blame was put on Marvelous, despite the fact they have nothing to do with the title. Starting in 2014, Marvelous decided to translate the series with a different translator as Story of Seasons. The last "true" Harvest Moon game at the time of Light of Hope's release was Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns. Light of Hope is done in-house by Natsume (the previous translators) and is, in essence, as much of a Spiritual Successor as Stardew Valley.
• The Sims fans generally try to avert this by referring to "EAxis", when it's not known if a problem is EA's fault or Maxis'.
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is sometimes blamed for changing a bizarre Tamriel into a Medieval European Fantasy. Much of these complaints stem from the fact that the elven provinces, as well as Cyrodiil, had quite a few non-European traits that originated in older games like Redguard or Morrowind. For example, Cyrodiil was a jungle, had large rice fields, had a vaguely Tenochtitlan like capital, and had a strong tattoo culture. While those complaints may be justified, some seem to think that all of Tamriel lacked traits from Medieval European Fantasy.
  • Bethesda took a bit of heat during the Nude Mod debacle... despite it being a fan-produced mod that manipulated textures rather than exploiting some hidden feature as some commentators claimed.
  • Morrowind fans tend to single out Bethesda's Todd Howard for the design choices in Oblivion and Skyrim that they don't like, even though the last game that he was in a lead design role for was... Morrowind.
  • A cross-media example for the franchise - in the two tie-in novels (The Infernal City and Lord of Souls), it's related that a few years after the events of Oblivion, the province of Morrowind was effectively obliterated. A large meteor that Vivec had frozen mid-fall had resumed its flight - without having lost any of its velocity - and struck Vivec City with enough force to cause Red Mountain to erupt, rendering vast swaths of the province (which many fans still think of fondly from the game set there) to be destroyed and rendered uninhabitable. Many fans blamed the books' author, Greg Keyes, for this change to the setting. In reality; this string of events was heavily foreshadowed within Morrowind itself by Michael Kirkbride roughly a decade before the novels were released.
• Castle of Shikigami II was released in the US with notoriously bad translation. Turns out that although the translation wasn't great, the original was incomprehensible as well.
• Tomb Raider fans often blame Core Design for the fact that the sixth installment (and the last installment of the original continuity), The Angel of Darkness, was released in a clearly unfinished state. As it turned out, publisher Eidos pestered Core Design to rush the game in spite of the fact that Core were unhappy with it, and if they didn't get it out on time, they would be fired. They released the game, it failed, and Eidos fired Core anyway.
  • When the franchise was given a reboot starting with Tomb Raider: Legend and under the guide of Crystal Dynamics, Lara Croft's personality changed to be more soft and emotional while still retaining her wit and bold attitude. This didn't sit well with the fans that saw the changes as making Lara look weak, especially in Tomb Raider: Anniversary which showed Lara visibly freaking out over her very first human kill. Fans thought that Crystal Dynamics was behind the changes, but it was actually Toby Gard, the creator behind the franchise and the character, who vouched for the changes since he wanted to take Lara on a more softer change ever since the very first game.
• While Konami has displayed their fair share of incompetence in handling BEMANI games outside of East Asia, they also tend to get blamed for things that weren't actually their fault — many of the screwups with DanceDanceRevolution series from DDR SuperNOVA onwards in the US are the fault of Betson, which Konami contracted to handle distribution of the series stateside. Others were because they were Screwed by the Lawyers of the music industry. Then there was the disastrous attempt at a nationwide official DDR tournament in 2009, where they made the mistake of partnering with GameWorks, which then proceeded to screw up the tournament in every way imaginable and then some.
• Jack Thompson attacked Take-Two on two occasions for content in games it published. Both times he insisted that Take-Two was the company to create the content, rather than the independent publishers:
  • The first incident was the infamous "Hot Coffee" discovery in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The game was developed by Rockstar Entertainment.
    • Rockstar itself was hit with this for the same thing - they were forced to rerelease the game with the "Hot Coffee" content completely removed (even going out of their way to make sure no mods could be installed^note unsurprisingly, one of the most popular downloads for the non-Steam PC version is a down-grade patch for people who want to play Multi Theft Auto), despite the content having already been Dummied Out and only becoming public knowledge by way of a Game Mod that nobody would be forced to download.
    • The second incident was the less famous "Nude Mod" for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The game was developed by Bethesda Softworks and, as mentioned previously, it was the product of a fan, not the studio.
  • On the topic of Grand Theft Auto, many fans initially blame the character striping glitch in Grand Theft Auto Online on Rockstar themselves. It was actually caused by bugs in NVidia's drivers, and a driver update fixed the issue (unfortunately, certain hardware configurations and cards older than the GTX400 series cannot use the update...).
  • Additionally, the radio music in GTAV is often considered bland and the fans blame Rockstar again for this. No, Rockstar actually outsourced the music choices to the DJs who they hired to host the stations. Kenny Loggins was responsible for the choices of the songs on Los Santos Rock Radio for example.
  • Many people think that Rockstar omitted planes from Grand Theft Auto IV out of respect for the events of 9/11, but the real reason for doing so was that the map was simply too small and densely packed for airplane travel to be viable.
  • When GTA V's modders started getting bans, copyright strikes and even the most simplistic modding tools were pulled of the internet, many blamed Rockstar for trying to stop modding despite promising they would allow mods in single player mode, presumably to sell more microtransactions. The copyright strikes came from Take-two Interactive, Rockstar's parent company, and they had nothing to do with them.
  • Rockstar's post-2013 lineup consisting mostly of Updated Rereleases and content updates for Grand Theft Auto V has given them the image that they just want to milk every last droplet they can out of Grand Theft Auto Online, but there's also the development of Red Dead Redemption 2 to consider. Unlike the first RDR which was just Rockstar San Diego's work, the sequel required virtually every developer working at a Rockstar studio to contribute, leaving only a skeleton crew who'd have a much easier time adding new content to GTAO than trying to make a new Bully, Manhunt, Midnight Club, etc. game.
• SNK and other associated companies aren't exempt from this, either. As one of the character designers for The King of Fighters, Nona often gets flak for the most recent entries in the series, due to their new art designs. While he was the art director for XII (and draws for the pre-fight exchanges in XIII), it's actually Ogura Eisuke, the artist for NeoGeo Battle Coliseum, who handled the artwork. For some odd reason, Nona is also being blamed for the story developments, an area that he has minimal influence in at best.
• Overkill Software is heavily blamed for removing some musical pieces in the game PAYDAY: The Heist and how they should have just paid the music composer of those tracks when it came to the release of the game's soundtrack. In actuality, the 2nd music composer in question is most likely already compensated for his work and the game's main music composer himself had to step in and say that in order for him to release the soundtrack, they had to have all the music be under his name in order to simplify the legal stuff surrounding the soundtrack release since the 2nd composer is not affiliated with Overkill anymore. People still demand for the old tracks to return.
  • Playstation 3 players that own the game also blame Overkill Software for dragging their feet with updates and patches for the system. While Overkill had promised in the past to try and get the updates out, many players don't realize that Sony charges a lot of money to developers that wish to update their game on the Playstation 3 (Microsoft has a similar policy with the Xbox 360) and Overkill Software isn't a big budget developer like other game studios such as Valve. Since Overkill was also developing Payday 2 at the same time, it's easy to see where the resources went.
    • The problem with patching for the console versions happened again when PAYDAY 2 was released. The Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game did get patches right up to the Armored Transport DLC, but support for the console versions suddenly stopped and went nearly a year without any updates or patches while the PC version had updates every single month. Console players blamed Overkill for being lazy and slow with the updates while Overkill stated that Microsoft and Sony were to blame because their patches failed certification and had to be redone all over again (and patches in general for consoles get expensive quick) while try to stay within the size limits for patches that were enforced by Sony and Microsoft. News about console patches went quiet for months until mid 2014 when Overkill announced the console versions of PAYDAY 2 would get a major update with lots of new content and bug fixes, though it wouldn't be up to the current PC version. The long delay was also likely due to Overkill implementing a new way to roll out updates and reduce the total size of the game, which would benefit people having little free space on their hard drives and also meeting Sony and Microsoft's stingy patch size restrictions. Eventually, Overkill abandoned trying to update the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game and decided to bring the game to the Playstation 4 and Xbox One instead since it was easier to update the game there, which pissed off a lot of fans.
• Both Sony and Superbot Entertainment of PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale have gotten much ire for its roster that omits much-requested characters like Solid Snake in favor of more contentious choices like reboot Dante/"Donte" and Raiden. However, many of these characters are from franchises that, while almost exclusively released on the Playstation line, are owned by third party publishers. Even if Sony and Superbot wanted to add the original Dante or Solid Snake, Capcom and Konami would use copyright laws to ban their inclusion. In fact, the inclusion of Raiden was made by none other than Hideo Kojima himself.
• Minecraft is widely known as Notch's creation. He did a lot of things to the game, but hasn't gotten involved with the game at all after the game went gold in 2011. Despite Jeb taking charge of the game and Notch stepping down, many people still think Notch runs the game and blame him if there's a change they don't like.
  • Speaking of Minecraft, Bethesda is routinely Mis-blamed for "trying to sue Mojang for using 'Scrolls' in a title," generally with some erroneous assumption it was a financial shakedown or product of some completely irrational fear of product confusion. While it's true that there was a copyright dispute pertaining to conflict between Mojang's game "Scrolls" and the game series "The Elder Scrolls", this is incorrect on two major fronts:
    • The legally responsible party was not Bethesda, but its parent company, Zenimax.
    • Zenimax was often criticized for "trying to claim ownership over the word 'Scrolls'" - when the entire point of the suit was to prevent someone from doing exactly that. Mojang was attempting to trademark "Scrolls" as a title, which, based on similar past situations, would have given them a potentially abuseable copyright edge over any other related products incorporating that term in their names. For precedent, look at the number of times Edge Games has legally shaken down other related entities for use of the word "Edge" - and that's without the trademark simply being the word on its own.
• Many people talk about the Sega Dreamcast as though it single-handedly killed Sega's console business, or at least was the biggest individual factor in them pulling out of that market. In actuality, the Saturn was far more culpable for that, thanks to its huge production costs and abysmal first-party software sales (largely thanks to Sonic X-treme dying in Development Hell; the American launch was even worse, between both being released four months earlier than anyone expected [thus ensuring there wasn't really anything to play at launch] and hiring Bernie Stolar as head of Sega of America [thus ensuring that anything good probably wouldn't make it to America anyway). The Dreamcast, by comparison, actually sold respectably well: 11 million in just over two years, compared to 9 million in four years for the Saturn. The console's only real failing was not being able to rescue Sega from the financial hole the Saturn and their various other mid-90s blunders (including the 32X, the Nomad, the Neptune and at least two other aborted consoles) put them in.
  • Speaking of Sonic X-treme, there's been plenty of misblame thrown around there too, with the most common accusations being that Bernie Stolar killed development when the game was still viable so that he'd have an excuse to ditch the Saturn itself a few months later, or that series co-creator Yuji Naka deliberately sabotaged the American development team so that the game would fall apart and Sega would have to wait until Sonic Team (who at the time were working on NiGHTS into Dreams…) was ready to make the next Sonic game itself. In reality though, no one individual can be blamed for how things turned out; development was just a complete train-wreck from start to finish, and by the end of it all the original game director had been fired from Sega due to personality clashes, his replacement had fallen severely ill, and by all accounts the development builds of the game when the plug was pulled were a barely playable mess. Stolar actually threw every possible resource at the development team in order to try and save the game (as questionable as some of his later decisions were, even he could see that a Sonic game was Sega's best hope of keeping the Saturn afloat), and while Naka didn't help things by refusing to allow the usage of the NiGHTS engine, that didn't make the difference between the game being released or not.
• Many fans of Toontown Online, Pirates of the Caribbean Online and Pixie Hollow blame Club Penguin for the closure of those three MMOs. Actually, Disney closed them due to financial problems.
• Mega Man's appearance in Street Fighter X Tekken has been blamed on Capcom's contempt for the Mega Man franchise and its fans following how things ended between the company and Keiji Inafune. In truth, Inafune himself requested that as a joke about how the franchise had aged, also saying that the man's been in other fighting games and it would be less interesting for him to appear normally in this one.
• After the enormous Porting Disaster that was the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight, many fans and PC players blamed Rocksteady for the terrible port, but actually, they didn't work on the PC version initially, it was ported by Iron Galaxy Studios, only 12 people worked on the port and they had a two-month deadline, the real fault is that studio and the publisher, Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment.
  • Another company who caught their share of misblame was nVidia, as within a matter of hours of the game's performance problems being known there were widespread accusations that the company's GameWorks technology (used in the game to provide physics and additional graphical effects) was deliberately crippling performance on all AMD hardware and even nVidia's older graphics cards, all in the name of making their then-new GeForce GTX 900 series cards look good. An accusation that might have carried a lot more weight if not for the fact that the GTX 900 cards also performed terribly, with or without the GameWorks effects enabled, and that there were other games around at the same time — most notably The Witcher 3 — that managed to implement said effects without performance tanking.
• Star Trek Online has a lot of players blaming Cryptic themselves for things they have no control over. Probably the big one focusing on the company themselves is ARC game launcher, something added by their parent company Perfect World Entertainment. It wasn't uncommon in the days when ARC was really taking off to have players sit there and constantly blame Cryptic for trying to force what they thought was malware into their systems. Another more recent one was when PWE fired a number of workers, some of them from Cryptic. Players instantly jumped on Cryptic to proclaim that this was because of the Delta Rising expansion before it was revealed that half of those let go from Cryptic came from Neverwinter.
  • Players are also happy to sit there and blame head developer Al "CaptainGeko" Rivera for anything and everything bad that happens. This descends into decisions that were made without him being around, a lot of this due to a major grudge many older players have towards him. Player gets kicked off of a player-ran podcast because of ego problems from the kicker? Geko's fault. Two developers decide to go their own ways? Geko fired them.
• Many Banjo-Kazooie fans pointed fingers at Microsoft for making the Xbox 360 installment Nuts & Bolts vehicular-based instead of doing a traditional platformer. Actually, Rare made the decision on their own.
  • Similarly, it was actually Rare's own idea to focus exclusively on Kinect games in the early-mid 2010s, though apparently in response to fears that Microsoft were considering closing the studio down after a string of flops.
• The Japanese version of Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle was hit hard with the 3.8.0 release, where a bug caused the drop rates on the gasha to plummet to abysmal levels, leading to players to accuse Akatsuki of rigging it. It didn't help this happened at the same time the Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) controversy was happening. Thankfully, Akatsuki pulled an Author's Saving Throw by revealing the code that caused the bug in the first place, gave everyone 300 Dragon Stones and refunded people for those who spent stones during that time.
• Michael Bay of all people picked up a lot of heat for the less-than-stellar reception of Need for Speed: The Run, despite having nothing to do with the game's development beyond directing a TV commercial for it. Admittedly, though, the game's marketing played up his name a lot, so it's not surprising that some people thought he had more involvement with the game than he actually did.
• Fans of Madou Monogatari typically finger Sega as the reason why no rereleases or remakes will ever come out for the series, instead putting all their focus on making more Puyo Puyo games. In reality, the series was more or less split in half due to legal reasons: Compile eventually bought back the Madou Monogatari name, but the characters were tied to the Puyo Puyo brand, hence Sorcery Saga using an original cast.
• Activision gets a lot of blame for the death of Troika Games, it being said they were forced to close by Activision after the initial failure of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. But in 2019 during an interview for The Outer Worlds, it was confirmed by the former studio heads that they survived a few more months but couldn't find a publisher for their next projects, which were mostly high concept pitches..
• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game is infamous for having gotten delisted from online stores, but whose fault is it? Many will point fingers at Anamanaguchi, because of music licensing issues or such, but Anamanaguchi themselves will tell you that's wrong. If your next instinct is to blame the author of Scott Pilgrim, Bryan Lee O'Malley, he made it clear that he wanted to bring it back too. It was most likely the fault of Universal being a distributor who for whatever reason let the license expire in 2014 — it took until 2020 for O'Malley to be able to establish contact with them and Ubisoft to negotiate a proper re-release in 2021.
• Multiple games (Such as a few Castlevania games) have listed a "Gorgon" as a rather bovine like monster that can petrify you. Sadly Mythtaken, as everyone knows that a "Gorgon" is Medusa, right? Actually, even Dungeons & Dragons depicts a "Gorgon" as a rather bovine like monster that is closer to a Catoblepas than a more serpentine gorgon. Actually, this comes from a 1981 Rand McNally encyclopaedia which described a Catoblepas as an african version of the "Gorgon", along with multiple translations which compared them as similar. This also is another case of Common Knowledge since a petrifying gaze is something that only Medusa had - her sisters Stheno and Euryale were also gorgons but did not turn people to stone.
• Blizzard Entertainment merged with Activision in 2008, and since the late 2010s have seen their once-stellar reputation plummet amidst multiple controversies. This has prompted angry former fans to lament Blizzard selling out to Activision... except it was their former parent company Vivendi Games—which had owned Blizzard since 1998—who agreed to and permitted the merge; Blizzard themselves had no say in the matter. The fact that the merged company is called Activision Blizzard rather than "Activision Vivendi" doesn't help, as the name gives the impression that Blizzard themselves directly merged with Activision rather than their former parent company.
• Sanzaru Games alone is oft solely blamed for Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time being a Franchise Killer with a Downer Ending of a cliffhanger. However, they did want to follow up on it via DLC, and it was Sony who refused to allow them to continue with the series. Additionally, the planned film went into Development Hell due to the unrelated circumstance of Ratchet & Clank (2016) being a Box Office Bomb. While Sanzaru's not blameless, there were factors and decisions outside of their control that contributed to the series ending on the bad note it did.
• One criticism that the NES game based off of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York was allegedly stolen sound effects. Fans will claim THQ stole from Acclaim's library. In reality, most of the Simpsons games at the time were developed by Imagineering, which Acclaim published most of their Simpsons games, not developed. This was not helped when The Angry Video Game Nerd reviewed Home Alone 2 in late 2007.
• The many issues from the mere existence of Persona 5: The Phantom X^note Microtransactions, Cast of Expies, Follow the Leader, New Work, Recycled Graphics, It's the Same, So It Sucks and They Changed It, Now It Sucks!, among harsher criticisms, especially related to the target demographic. cause the Persona fandom to paint Atlus and/or Sega as a lost cause and completely greedy, tainting expectations for the next Persona entries. The fandom even accuses this game for taking away Persona team's development time for the next mainline games. However, Atlus only officially licensed The Phantom X and oversaw the creative aspects. The game itself was developed by Black Wings Game Studio, part of Perfect World, not P-Studio. Not to mention, mainland China never officially got Persona 5 at all, hence the similar story flow with Cast of Expies albeit in gacha format. The Phantom X is primarily developed for the Chinese audience, though Word of God admitted to be surprised by the hype from outside China, which fueled this further.
• The one-time online DRM for pairing the PlayStation 5 slim model's disc drive (together or seprate) is not Sony's doing. It turns out, they are forced by the DMCA's 17 U.S. Code § 1201 which is illegal to "circumvent a technological measure that controls access to a copyrighted work". Meaning the disc drive must be an official one, not the unlicensed third-party drives as an unauthorized usage.
• Cotton Guardian Force Saturn Tribute, a Compilation Re-release of two Cotton games and Guardian Force, is widely regarded as a Porting Disaster for having 10 frames of input lag, and the developer of the port, City Connection, was quickly blamed for those 10 frames. However, that's only roughly half correct. The three games already have about 6 frames of lag on the Sega Saturn, and 6 frames is already a lot for many players. Barring emulation techniques like runahead that may require very strong hardware due to their reliance on rapidly creating and loading savestates, it would not have been possible for City Connection to port the games to have input response that would please most players.

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