Video games in general fell into this category when they became popular during the '80s and '90s. In many cases, there was a notable divide between the children who enjoyed playing them and parents who felt they distracted them from doing more constructive things. Since many of today's parents grew up with them, however, this is a dying trope.
Due to the longtime perception of video games as a "men's" hobby as a result of many games being designed to look and feel hyper-masculine, many women resented video games and saw them as distracting men from romantic commitments to go on virtual toxic-masculinity power fantasies. This is largely going away as the number of women who play video games rival the number of men and more and more games put female characters in the spotlight and present them as deeply-written characters who aren't just sex symbols, allowing for protagonist characters that female players can actually relate to.
The Console Wars are a recurring example: Those who pick one side have no desire to try anything from the other sides. It's an enforced mindset, as a console is an expensive investment and most can't afford to buy multiple systems. Then there's PC gamers, who see consoles as all overpriced and lacking the flexibility of PCs, and at best will emulate console games on their PCs.
Any of the big console shooter franchises draw plenty of flak from players who dislike FPSes, PC gamers, and fans of older styles of shooters. The Call of Duty and Halo series may be the most common victims, but they are not alone. First-person shooters are also frequent scapegoats of people who hold the assumption that their fandom of "cerebral" games such as Silent Hill somehow makes them more intelligent than the primates who play Call of Duty, et. al.
This makes for a very strange inverted hatedom in retrospect, as until the 2010s or so you had to have a PC (and a reasonably powerfully one) if you wanted to play an FPS due to the limitations of the consoles of the day. Still, even modern consoles' limitations — such as the ever-present gamepad vs. mouse — are picked apart by PC gamers, sometimes deemed as reasons why FPS game design has been dumbed down since the mid-'00s.
The major pet peeve was that on the side of the FPS crowd, they hated it for how it monopolized shooters into a single uniform genre with very little deviation (Iron Sights/Regenerating Health and Cutscene Incompetence). For the others, they see the shooters as completely strangulating what creativity is left in the industry as game developers are crushed by publishers for not living up to their Cash-Cow Franchise standards.
In the late 2000s, it was common for non-gaming women to complain about Call of Duty or Halo, in particular boyfriends who would invite them to their houses but then only play the game by themselves or online with others all day instead of bonding as couples.
Overly popular and mainstream adult-oriented games — most notably Call of Duty, but also annualized sports games such as Madden NFL and to a lesser extent Grand Theft Auto — get this reaction from "geekier" and more dedicated gamers, who collectively label them as "dudebro games", criticize them for being Real Is Brown, the same thing each year, and (for the action games) Rated M for Money, claim that they cater to the Lowest Common Denominatornote which is one reason GTA gets a bit more slack in this respect, as its games are considered to be very high-quality and unique. Probably helping in this regard is that there's not a new GTA game every year, and resent the fact that their popularity and playerbase overshadows their preferred "nerdy" games many times over. However, many of these haters technically fall within the 18-35 affluent demographic that the "dudebro" games are targeting, although this doesn't stop (exaggerated) accusations that the "dudebro" games are typically played by pottymouthed 10-year-olds.
Mascot Horror, a subgenre of Survival Horror games that was popularized by Five Nights at Freddy's and also includes titles such as Baldi's Basics, Poppy Playtime, Garten of Banban, and Choo-Choo Charles, which focus on "marketable" monsters, use Story Breadcrumbs and Jigsaw Puzzle Plots to encourage theorizing, and are meant to appeal to younger audiences and streamers. Most of these tend to be at least flash-in-the-pan hits that dominate gaming YouTube for a couple of months, while others have had longer-term success, but some people hate these games because they're meant to appeal to younger people than more traditional horror games and have been accused of dumbing down the genre. Garten of Banban and Poppy Playtime in particular are infamous for attracting this type of hate due to being seen as Merchandise-Driven cash-grabs.
Mobile Phone Games are disliked by traditionalist console and PC gamers due to not being as preservable as games on other platforms, as a mobile game that isn't routinely updated to meet the standards of mobile OS updates is doomed to become unplayable on a modern device, plus they do not have physical releases which are championed amongst retro gamers. Beyond that, the same gamers often generalize them as shallow games with sloppy controls and predatory business models, blame these games for what they perceive to be a corrupt modern video game industry due to how lucrative they are, and as such swear never to install games on their phones ever. This is generally a view held in the West, as gamers in developing countries (most notably Southeast Asian countries) tend to be more receptive to mobile games due to their lower costs to start the game or being outright free to start, and being on devices they probably already have. Mobile-based gamers generally don't reciprocate the feeling; while they don't have a hatred of console and PC games, they just find them too expensive of a hobby (on top of possible import price hikes).
Gacha Games are reviled by traditionalist gamers for what they view to be an exploitative business model that preys on players' desires for particular characters or benefits, and they are frequently mobile games with all the disdain from console and PC gamers that entail. A common mockery of gacha games is "they make you spend hundreds of dollars for a 0.001% chance to get a jpg file of your waifu."
Arcade ticket-redemption games are met with scorn by people who prefer "hardcore" genres of arcade games like Fighting Games and Rhythm Games for being novelty cash-grabs that they feel take space away from their preferred games.
Pachinko and pachislot machines are largely hated by Western gamers, believing them to be a threat to the video game industry ever since the infamous Konami scandals of 2015-2016 that caused them to come under fire for supposedly cancelling long-running video game franchises in favor of producing pachinko adaptations of video games (while a lot of the grievances are legitimate and concern the treatment of Konami employees, the pachinko bit ignores that Konami's pachinko branch has been active since 1994). Konami pachinko wasn't the only victim, as when similar adaptations were made of Soulcalibur and Devil May Cry, gamers immediately screamed "dead franchise!" again (And ended up being proven wrong thanks to the releases of Soulcalibur VI and Devil May Cry 5). To this day, a common meme regarding dead video game franchises is that they are being used as fodder for these gambling machines. Note that what especially makes pachi- machines an example is that they aren't even produced for or advertised to Western markets anyway — it's largely a case of people believing that they are taking away resources (e.g. budget and developers) from the production of video games.
MMO games are disliked by many parents, spouses, and teachers of their players due to how frightfully addicting they can be, causing players to lose track of real-world commitments like school and household chores, in an example of toxic escapism. If not for the addiction factor, it's because these games by their nature can't be paused, leading to parent-child disputes about getting household tasks (taking out trash, watering the backyard plants, etc.) done but the child can't just pause the game and have to put the chores on hold for a bit because they're in the middle of a raid at the moment and it would be disrespectful to guild/party-mates to just abandon their in-game duties.
NFT Games will cause one of two strong, but opposite reactions, depending on if you're part of the target audience or not. Cryptocurrency fans will gain Ethereum signs in their eyes as they see an opportunity to earn some money by playing video games. Everyone else will reel back in revulsion and horror, due to the amount of these games that turned out to be scams, as well as the environmental impact of Blockchain technology.
Individual Examples:
Microsoft 3D Movie Maker has McZee, a weird purple guy who really wants to be Barney-but-wackier. He's pretty horrible, and the exclusion of him as a posable character is about the only reason the first four thousand fan-made movies weren't all "McZee dies in horrible ways".
If the marketing is anything to go by, amiibo are intended for kids that want toys of Nintendo characters. However there is a hatedom for amiibo by two groups: Those who think that they are overly-expensive dolled-up physical DLC, most notably with Splatoon and Animal Crossing amiibo, and those who think that amiibo has way too much focus on stocking the kid-friendly characters, especially from Pokémon, and forgetting the franchises that skew more towards Nintendo's Periphery Demographic or are outright intended for mature audiences (such as Fire Emblem).
Although the main Animal Crossing series (surprisingly) never got this treatment, the spinoff game Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer does. It removes the life sim aspect of the game and focuses on interior design. Many fans were stumped on why anyone would want to play an Animal Crossing game without the main aspects; however, there is a market out there for designer games. Despite the heavy criticism, it sold quite well in Japan.
Though Happy Home Designer has its fans, the same cannot be said for Amiibo Festival, which suffers from irritating gameplay and making amiibos necessary (to wit, in order to play as specific characters, you had to scan their Amiibo during each of your turns), and simply not being a new mainline Animal Crossing game. This resulted in a commercial failure that was torn apart by critics and fans alike.
The Atari 2600 is disliked by many retro gamers who prefer to ignore consoles before the NES. People often complain about the graphics and quality of the games (especially arcade ports).
EA tried to exploit this with their "Your Mom hates Dead Space 2" marketing campaign. It didn't exactly work; the intended market responded with "Thanks a lot for casting us all as immature jerks. It's not like games don't have trouble with that perception already." It seemed to completely miss gaming's shift in demographics from just kids and teens to people of all ages.
Doom, like most countercultural works at the time, received utterly insane amounts of backlash from Moral Guardians, who felt the game's bloody violence and Satanic imagery (even though the demons are the bad guys) encouraged real-life acts of violence in younger and more impressionable players. Not helping matters is that, just as the initial controversy was winding down, it was discovered that the Columbine shooters were fans of the game and had made some custom levels of their own. While custom Doom stages were, and still are, a dime a dozen due to how easily you can make them, this immediately led to a since-discredited urban legend that they had used the game to make virtual recreations of their high school as a "practice run" for the massacre, causing the hysteria to flare right back up.
Dynasty Warriors has fans who take every opportunity to bash the Shu Kingdom for not really being as heroic as the early games made them out to be. This hate comes from people who read the actual history surrounding the Three Kingdoms Era and realized that Shu and their officers were bloody, violent, less than scrupulous people who got their fame boosted by the novel. Unfortunately, those same people miss the point that both Romance of the Three Kingdoms and, subsequently, Dynasty Warriors are NOT based off of the actual Chinese history, but rather the books themselves. It's not going to feature Sun Jian historically slay Hua Xiong, because in the NOVEL, it was Guan Yu.
People who play EA sports games get a lot of hatred of gamers who do not play them. The main reason behind it seems to be that they are the same game in a brand new package and the fact that it is blamed for making games more unoriginal. Then there's the fact that the FIFA games introduced and normalized the much disliked lootboxes in full-priced AAA games, which many have compared to gambling.
Awakening and Fates also invert this in another way: they are generally beloved by mainstream gamers and critics and often considered some of the best 3DS games of all time. Their reception among the core Fire Emblem fanbase, however, is much more contentious.
Goodbye Volcano High is a 2D cinematic narrative game made in large part for a queer audience. Unfortunately, it was revealed during Sony's 2020 "Future of Gaming" event where it was sandwiched between major PlayStation 5 titles that were made to demonstrate the hardware's capabilities, making it stand out like a sore thumb. The "hardcore gamer" crowd — which primarily consists of straight men — scorned the game. Even three years later, after suffering Development Hell and finally releasing in August 2023, trailers and preview videos are still mass downvoted by an audience the game was never targeted towards.
Kirby gets this reaction from a small number of game reviewers and fans of other Nintendo series, due to the series' cutesy aesthetic (the frequent Nightmare Fuel notwithstanding) and the easiness of most of the games (except when it comes to 100% Completion) in order to make them accessible to small children.
Their pachinko and slot machines, especially their newer ones, are hated by millions of Western gamers who are sore about most of Konami's consumer IPs getting the short end of the stick, even though most of these people will probably never touch one of these machines in their entire lives due to pachislots being largely Japan-exclusive. Konami has had an active pachislot division since 1994, and they made dozens of pachinko machines based on Konami properties without incurring the wrath of gamers (including the aforementioned Westerners) until Konami Digital Entertainment's controversial actions of 2015 and 2016, at which point people looked at what Konami still had to offer, noticed KPE's then-upcoming Fanservice-ladenCastlevania: Erotic Violence slot machine, and then came down hard on that and every subsequent KPE-produced slot machine.
For similar reasons, Bombergirl is hated even by those who have no interest in Bomberman (which was a Hudson Soft series until Hudson's acquisition by Konami), for not only twisting a beloved franchise but also being a blatant example of Sex Sells and more "proof" that Konami only cares about money and not producing quality content. Similar to Konami pachinko, Bombergirl is sold only in Asian countries and therefore it is unlikely that non-travelling Westerners will get to see and play it and therefore give any criticism based on the game's own demerits.
There aren't many non-Rhythm Game-playing Westerners who are even aware that that the BEMANI franchise still exists and is still being produced by Konami, but if they do, they generally feel that Konami's talents should be better spent on console and PC games that can reach a wider audience rather than games that are part of a dwindling industry and are restricted to a scant few parts of the world, i.e. "instead of continuing to make DanceDanceRevolution give us a new Silent Hill or something."
League of Legends as a game gets a lot of hate from non-MOBA fans, though largely because of its community's reputation for being extremely toxic.
Mortal Kombat. Most of the vitriol directed at the series when the first game debuted in late 1992 came from panicky Moral Guardians and people who would have never played the game in a million years.
The Nintendo 2DS, which removes the clamshell and 3D features and sells at a lower price than the original 3DS, has received a fair number of complaints from adult and teenage gamers, despite being designed as an 'entry-level' system for children.note The 3D feature is not recommended for young children, due to lack of safety testing. The clamshell is the weakest part of the physical design and, therefore, most likely to be broken by small children who haven't yet grasped the concept of "excessive force results in broken toys". The lower price isn't specifically a child-friendly feature, but savvy gamers have noticed that the difference is exactly the cost of Pokémon X and Y, a franchise well known for its younger-demographic appeal and with which the 2DS shares its release date.
The Switch Lite, a handheld version of the Switch, went through a similar cycle, gathering a lot of flak from fans for ditching the primary feature of original console (being able to use it both as a home and portable device) despite being primarily made as a budget console and an option for people who prefer their games on the go.
Nintendo franchises are often geared towards younger players or an all-ages audience and likewise Nintendo platforms in general tend to have games with the same target demographic, which results in mockery from those who prefer more adult-oriented games. One notable effect of this is the backlash to Bayonetta 2 being revealed as a Nintendo-platform exclusive (first on Wii U then later on Nintendo Switch), part of which could be summed up as "Why is Bayonetta on a kiddy platform?"note Although there is also the complaint that since the original Bayonetta was released on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, those who played that game when it first came out on those platforms would have to buy a new system just to play the sequel.
Since the Wii, Nintendo consoles have been focused more on unique controllers and play styles than on raw power, unlike their Microsoft and Sony contemporaries, in an effor to reach out to demographics that tend to not play video games that much as well as those who simply don't care for cutting-edge visuals and want a system that's affordable and sufficient for playing lower-budget games, especially indie games. As a result, they're derided by Xbox and PlayStation loyalists for not being able to handle big-name games or carrying lower-quality ports with reduced framerate and/or resolution and what they consider unusable gimmick controls.
The franchise as a whole got plenty of this during the initial craze's heyday, and you'd still be hard-pressed to find an enthusiastic fan who wasn't a preteen or younger when it first came out. While the games have more universal appeal than, say, the anime, they're still made primarily with kids in mind, although from 2013 onwards the franchise has been reinventing itself as an "all-ages" franchise similar to Super Mario Bros. itself rather than a franchise mostly for young children. Even so, the franchise still gets this from time to time, to the point that adult fans are mocked for enjoying the franchise (even if it's through Pokémon GO, which is well-known for being a mainstream success and more directly tailored to adult smartphone users).
Some fans of the earliestgames, known as GENWUNNERSnote after the GEEWUNNERS in the Transformers fandom, can have this towards some incarnations of the game. Chalk it up to a combination of They Changed It, Now It Sucks!, Nostalgia Filternote considering how glitch-ridden the original games were — the Good Bad Bugs had the side effect of making an easy game mind-numbingly easier for adult players and this trope, from aging out of the intended demographic.
Pokémon Black and White are frequently accused of having spawned the "genwunner" phenomenon, a strong example of a Periphery Hatedom for the newer games. While the games were highly praised by fans and critics, they also completely displaced older Pokémon by introducing a self-contained ecosystem of 156 brand-new species. Many adults who grew up with the older games took issue and compared them negatively to Gen I and II Pokémon to memetic levels. Seeing this reaction, Game Freak deliberately catered to fansof the classic 'mons in subsequent games, and saw an excuse to print even more money. However, this in turn later caused the cycle to begin anew (albeit on a smaller scale), with fans of BW (now adults in their own right) venting their spite towards later games for abandoning the new direction that was promised in BW and essentially becoming just like the "genwunners" of old.
Within the franchise, Series Mascot Pikachu is probably the most infamous example, due to its Spotlight-Stealing Squad tendencies, the number of Electric-type rodents that try to emulate Pikachu's popularity (known as "Pika-clones" by the fandom), and its strong association with the anime (which has its own entry on this page); in fact, it was one of the most frequent targets of mockery in early Pokémon parodies.
As with the anime, Pokémon is an enormously famous and popular Sacred Cow among millennials, Gen Z, and their children, who collectively make up the series' target demographic. However, since its inception, it has been hated, mocked and/or dismissed by baby boomers and older Gen X'ers, who continue to see it as a childish, shallow Merchandise-Driven franchise with no broader appeal.
Pokémon GO isn't well-liked amongst workers and owners of publicly-accessible properties (most notably churches, cemeteries, and museums), due to its gameplay encouraging players to go out and explore landmarks, and Pokémon fans aren't exactly known for behaving their best in public, with some either being rowdy, committing acts of trespassing, or endangering themselves while playing the game. As a result, those owners have complained to Niantic to have Poké Stops (the main interaction points for the game) removed from their properties' in-game locations. Note that Pokémon Go isn't Niantic's first GPS-based game, as they previously developed Ingress. While there are certainly cases of Ingress-related hooliganism, it's not to the same degree or quantity as Pokémon Go since it doesn't have the brand name power of Pokémon (instead being an original work), it's aimed at an older demographic, and the game's lore and premise of the player being a covert agent for one of two conspiracy factions encourages them to be on their best behavior in public.
Roblox as a whole gets a lot of flack from older gamers (particularly those who didn't play it as kids) due to its community being perceived as immature, which matters because Roblox is a multiplayer game that relies largely on user-generated content (which naturally also leads to a number of low-quality games). Even older gamers who did grow up with it are known to complain about how much it's changed since they joined. It has also attracted controversy from parents due to concerns/news stories regarding predators targeting children on the platform.
The most popular Roblox game, Adopt Me!, receives significant hate outside its targeted audience of young children and casual players. Haters regard it as an overrated boring game, only serving as a Cash-Cow Franchise for the developers with its numerous Loot Boxes and Microtransactions and overrun with children very desperately begging for valuable pets, rich players flexing their valuable pets to others, and scammers targeting and tricking gullible children. They also accuse the game of being botted and constantly breaking Roblox servers because of how many players there are on it.
This is in play for basically every game in Roblox among the community. Town Roleplays (and to a lesser extent, Roleplays in general) are frequently stereotyped as being "ODer" hubs note ODer] means "online dater" and refers to people who play specifically to get a date, though they are functionally a non-issue due to romance rpers being misidentified for online daters, which is part of why the stereotype exists, fighting games are decried as being full of edgy 12 year old boys, god forbid you make a game for furries due to the site's general vitriol for them.
Skylanders was a very notorious case. The games got a lot of hate, mainly because of the franchise's alleged lack of originality, emphasis on figures to expand the gameplay, and the fact that Spyro and Cynder are playable characters despite Spyro himself not getting a new game for years. This has died down in more recent years due to a lack of new games since 2016 and the original demographic (now adults in their own right) remembering the games fondly.
Sonic's Werehog form from Sonic Unleashed. Kids love him, most fans who left Sonic's intended demographic hate him.
Cream the Rabbit. Beloved by moe fans for her deliberate cuteness, despised by the older Sonic fans for having a submissive attitude contrary to the defiant one around which the series was built. This is a case of Americans Hate Tingle, however — Cream was designed around Japanese fans, who enjoy her Yamato Nadeshiko traits, and was never meant to be embraced in the west, whereas characters like Blaze the Cat fall more in line of likable female characters outside of Asia. This has more or less faded as of the mid-2010s: the younger generation of fans who grew up with the early Modern-era games where Cream was prominent (and are now adults) tend to think much more fondly of her than the old guard, who have either grown out of the series, have found other Sonic characters they dislike more, or just aren't as vocal about their dislike for the character. Saying that Cream has been Vindicated by History may be a bit much, but these days, it isn't at all hard to find at least a few people who will name her as a favorite.
The entire Sonic the Hedgehog franchise got a Periphery Hatedom, including from some of its older fans, though it has less to do with them growing out of it and more with it deviating from what they knew. Those who were never fans tend to regard it as the realm of unnecessary characters that inspire lame fancharacters and Rule 34 artists.
The Sonic franchise has also gathered some hatred from fans of other Sega franchises because it is Adored by the Network. Especially because unlike Nintendo's mainthreefranchises, Sonic is the only franchise Sega has with the Cash-Cow Franchise treatment, and as a result, sales for games from other Sega franchises have suffered due to the lack of the same marketing and exposure for them that was instead put into the latest Sonic games. This is a bigger point of contention with Western fans than Japanese fans since the franchise has more popularity outside its native Japan than within it, while this isn't the case back in Japan where some of Sega's other current Japanese franchises overtake Sonic's in popularity and may even be Cash Cow Franchises in their own right there and there, only. The No Export for You situations these same games may suffer only adds more fuel to the fire some Western Sega fans will have against Sonic.
Splatoon is the polar opposite of what is expected from shooters: It's very brightly colored, the protagonists are teenagers, it's full of comedy and slapstick, the violence is (mostly) non-lethal, there is no native voice chat, and there is no (traditional) war or sci-fi elements to it. This has caused many fans of series like Call of Duty to mock the series for being "kiddy" and "not a real shooter". Inversely, many fans of Splatoon dislike the boring colors and overly serious nature of COD and lobby insults right back.
In The '90s, there was a lot of scorn from "hardcore" PlayStation gamers for Spyro the Dragon, which was made to draw young children to the console. The games were mocked as cash-grabs that shouldn't be popular on a "big kid" console like the PS1. The hatedom has since become non-existent as many current hardcore gamers were fans of the series growing up.
The 2018 remake, Spyro Reignited Trilogy, gets some hate from fans of the original who object to some aesthetic changes and character redesigns.
Some fans of Street Fighter II will complain about every other fighting game that exists. If it is a 2D one, they'll blame it for being a clone. If it is a 3D one, they will blame it for being a 'button masher'. It's gotten to the point where games that are much more complex than Street Fighter are looked down on by fans. The truth is that the Nostalgia Filter comes into play. In later years, Street Fighter IV has become this, with every new incarnation of Tekken or Soulcalibur being compared unfavorably to it despite being largely different in gameplay.
A local example (in Brazil) happened when Laura was announced for Street Fighter V, mainly due to her revealing clothes. Some people complained about Capcom over exaggerating Brazilian stereotypes again (it can't be helped by the fact Laura is from Rio de Janeiro, a well known city for illegal sex tourism). This only worsened when Laura got more revealing clothes which made some people accusing Capcom of damaging the image of Brazilian woman. The hatedom towards Laura dissolved some time after.
The Mario franchise, normally one of Nintendo's biggest Sacred Cows for being its "mascot" franchise, can experience some hatred from older fans. A strong example was the Nintendo 3DS / Wii U era from 2012 to 2016, where the games showed stereotypical signs of pandering to children and casual players,note the games becoming shallower, more repetitive and less innovative, the franchise's typical Excuse Plots becoming even stronger than before, a general cutesy and nonthreatening vibe; some games, such as Paper Mario: Sticker Star, have a very pronounced hatebase of older gamers. Such deviations can also make Mario's typical Wolverine Publicity more embarrassing for Nintendo fans, especially fans of other franchises. However, this is technically a subversion; the Mario games are targeted towards all ages (moreso than Pokémon), placing the hatedom in the Mario'sintended demographic of "everyone".note Its placement on this page is a very contentious manner in itself, as it's debated on if it fits under an Audience-Alienating Era or a Periphery Hatedom.
Super Mario as a whole, as well as Pokémon, Kirby, and other similar series, get this treatment from fans of "dark and edgy" series such as Call of Duty, who dismiss Nintendo's series as being too silly and optimistic. But these fans are often kids themselves, in the mature series' own Periphery Demographic, who complain about things that they perceive as "babyish" because they think it's cool.
Nintendo's "Play Nintendo" marketing branch, aimed at children, is disliked by some older fans for being overly quirky and kid-focused (even coming across as condescending in some cases) and for taking the Wolverine Publicity of the Super Mario Bros. franchise Up to Eleven. However, this does not affect the content of the games themselves.
osu! is disliked by a fair number of musicians due to the game's nature of allowing players to create charts/beatmaps for songs they don't have the rights to, and then upload both the beatmaps and their respective songs to the game servers for others to play. As a result, some of those musicians and/or their lawyers have issued DMCA claims to take down those songs and their charts. This is a big part of why osu! adapted the Featured Artists program, to showcase musicians who have given users their blessings to create and upload beatmaps for their songs.
The Fandom Rivalry between the various Super Smash Bros. entries qualifies for this trope. While the games are primarily for casual, friendly play, they also have a sizable fanbase of competitive players, especially for Melee. A sector of the Melee fanbase vocally derides other Smash entries for being too casual-friendly and not as exciting to watch competitively as their favored game.
Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE is on the receiving end of this trope from the Shin Megami Tensei fandom for being too "anime". To them, Persona 4 was pushing it but this one crossed the line. The fact that the game's plot revolves around the Idol Singer business is an aggravating factor, as the business is widely despised by people in the West, even anime fans. This also heavily contrasts Persona 4: Dancing All Night's deconstruction of the idol business by showing just how horrible and unfair it is to the idols, which didn't help with the Persona 4 fans who weren't alienated.
Vampire Survivors catches some heat from Shoot 'Em Up (a.k.a. "shmup") fans not because of the game's merits, but because its categorization as a Bullet Hell game in addition to its categorization as a Roguelike (as opposed to a traditional arcade-style scrolling shooter) has shifted the popular definition of what a "shmup" is, due to the shmup genre's longstanding association with the Bullet Hell trope. This came to a head in summer 2023 when the Steam community held a "Steam Shmup Fest" event that infamously included a lot of non-shmup games; the event featured roguelikes like Vampire Survivors which itself was one of the most prominently-featured games and platformers like Rabi-Ribi, among other non-shmup genres, with their common element being curtains of enemy bullets. Conversely some games that are bonafide shmups got rejected for supposedly not meeting the definition, with one of the most infamous examples being the rejection of Terra Flame, a Genre Throwback to Horizontal Scrolling Shooters of The '90s like Thunder Force that is decidedly not a bullet hell game. As a result, Vampire Survivors has become a sore point amongst the shmup community for what they see as distorting a term that's been well-defined for decades.
The Nintendo Wii is an interesting case. Once Nintendo finally did what they had promised to do and expanded console video games outside the 18-24 Affluent Male market, said market declared them the anti-Christ. Even Nintendo's continued development of "traditional" gamesnote which continue to far outnumber their "expanded market" titles hasn't silenced the hatedom one bit. The rest of the market didn't notice (much to the chagrin of the 18-24 Affluent one). Among the platform's games, the worst sufferers of this were of course the "expanded market" games themselves: Nintendo's "Wii Series" games directed towards non-gamers such as Wii Sports, Wii Fit, and others. During the late 2000s, they were a gigantic fad that outsold and were played more than most other games by a huge margin, causing the 18-24 Affluent Male market to declare gaming ruined and fear for its senior-citizen-and-soccer-mom-ruled future. However, as the fad has died, so has the hate.
The market, however, did eventually notice when Nintendo attempted a successor, the Wii U. Despite on paper being a logical successor to the Wii, having the same drawbacks in its own generation that the Wii did (minimal online support, reduced third party support, weak graphics in comparison to the competition, difficulty to port games to the console due to its drawbacks), it crashed and burned so hard that Nintendo was forced to create a new console for the same console generation, the Nintendo Switch. As Nintendo had lost the hardcore gaming market with the Wii, they were reliant on their new primary market to purchase the Wii U in order for it to succeed. Not being traditional gamers, they didn't follow the behavior patters of traditional gamers and buy out of brand loyalty or seeking to be able to play sequels to their favorite exclusive franchises, as gaming culture promotes buying the "new hot thing". Ironically, Nintendo should have known about this problem, as back in the 90s they had to take steps both to prevent people from calling other consoles "nintendos" and to make sure people understood what the SNES was due to parents (the primary purchasers of video game consoles at the time) not immediately understanding the idea of a new console from the same developer. One of the immediate problems the Wii U faced upon debut? People not understanding it was a new system and not just some sort of updated Wii.
World of Warcraft, during its peak in the 2000s, was hated by many parents and spouses of people who played the game but did not play the game themselves, due to what they considered to be a collective addiction to the game that came at the expense of one's relationships with others and other external commitments. One particular episode of The Tyra Banks Show details a couple in which the wife's marrage with her husband was strained by him playing World of Warcraft, which resulted in a "solution" where the husband shredded the install CD as part of an announcement of him quitting the game.note Not that that act alone would've helped, as the CD is only used to install the game, it's not needed to be in the CD tray to play it. The game can also be officially downloaded as well, which is the only method of distributing the game today. And finally, the game runs on a paid subscription model, so to prevent himself from playing altogether he would also have to cancel his subscription. That said it's possible he already uninstalled the game properly and unsubscribed or did both afterwards while off-camera, and that the CD shredding was just symbolism; unless his computer was a laptop instead of a non-portable desktop, bringing the PC to the studio to demonstrably uninstall and unsubscribe would be a tall order.
Yo-kai Watch received this from a chunk of older US gamers in general, and especially Mon fans, simply because it was the current big thing in Japan amongst elementary school children. It received a huge Fandom Rivalry with Pokémon due to them being perceived as similar. Many gamers, even major Nintendo reviewers, ignored the series because it was too similar to Pokémon for their liking.
", criticize them for being Real Is Brown, the same thing each year, and (for the action games) Rated M for Money, claim that they cater to the Lowest Common Denominatornote , and resent the fact that their popularity and playerbase overshadows their preferred "nerdy" games many times over. However, many of these haters technically fall within the 18-35 affluent demographic that the "dudebro" games are targeting, although this doesn't stop (exaggerated) accusations that the "dudebro" games are typically played by pottymouthed 10-year-olds.