I skipped on voting US government because they just win a broader general hottest mess award. Them being in these options is like Shohei Ohtani showing up to play in a Little League game.
I went with:
1. Microsoft. These days they seem only capable of stepping on rakes, shooting themselves in the feet, and propping up the AI bubble. Broader than gaming, they've started to actively destroy every major product they make either with aggressive monetization, aggressive enshittification, or by cramming them full of either broken or useless AI tech. They doomed millions of perfectly functional PCs to be e-waste with their unnecessary sunsetting of Windows 10 and their business decisions with Xbox have functionally done the same for millions of Xbox consoles. Their CEO seems like he might genuinely have lost touch with reality and is so extremely AI-pilled that it seems like the only way to save Microsoft from the AI death spiral would require an entire leadership change at this point.
Any illusion that the Xbox division is somehow protected from the mindnumbingly stupid decisions Satya Nadella and other senior Microsoft leadership make is gone. Every time Xbox had anything resembling a small win this year, Microsoft would make sure to show up and force them to do something at least an order of magnitude more potent in a negative direction to ensure that Xbox was always on the back foot. Microsoft's current expectations of Xbox are more or less dooming it. The expectations heaped on Xbox are unrealistic and unsustainable. It doesn't help that Xbox's leadership seems to be flailing a lot, but given how ridiculous Microsoft's requirements for them are, you can't really blame them for struggling to deal with the demands of a man who thinks it's totally normal, definitely-not-sociopathic behaviour to have an AI summarize a podcast for him then talk to the AI about the podcast rather than, you know, listen to the podcast and engage with other humans.
The company is completely devoid of ethics now. Between their gross business dealings with fairly demonstrably bad governments around the world (stuff their own employees protest them about from within the company), their willing destruction of the planet at the altars of AI and profits (again, something like an 8 digit number of business PCs became e-waste a few weeks ago), and their leadership's willingness to destroy every ounce of goodwill built up during the Ballmer (and even early Nadella) era to chase marginal profits, there's no real way I can nominate any of the other options as number one. Microsoft has willingly destroyed Xbox and Windows. Xbox were in a good place five years ago to make a decent comeback but Microsoft just couldn't help themselves. They blew up the Game Pass pipeline of new products, removed any reason to buy their products, doubled the price on the one remaining decent service they had, and have nothing to show for it. They've torpedoed everything that was good about them and replaced it all with (AI) garbage.
Microsoft's behaviour has been bad enough that I've decided that until drastic changes are made, I'm no longer using or engaging with any of their products or services. It seems I'm not alone in this. I've seen so many folks express a desire to stop using Windows and other Microsoft products. So much so that it gave me the inspiration to write a series ofblogs on what making the switch to modern Linux is like. Given the response, it's clear I'm not the only one interested in the topic. Let's just say, when the free option built largely by volunteers with no budget is better than the product of a company worth trillions, then something is going drastically wrong at that company.
2. Other - Roblox. Since Roblox is mostly popular with young children, it doesn't tend to get a lot of airtime in enthusiast gaming press. It should though. Roblox is one of the biggest games in the world. It has probably an order of magnitude more players than almost any other game you can think of outside of like Fortnite. This is a huge problem if you pay any attention at all to what's going on with Roblox.
The people running Roblox do not give a singular fuck. Like seriously. They only care about keeping the money train going. They've resisted any and all pressure to clean up the platform and only have caved when lawmakers have threatened to create legislation to force them to clean up their act.
Think of the greediest, most predatory forms of monetization you've seen in games, be they mobile, gacha, or console games. Now think of how that monetization could be made even more cynical and vile. Then think about that monetization being targeted at young children who don't know any better. That's Roblox. Imagine a Counter-Strike like game where you could pay money to get unfair advantages such that other players who don't pay have a miserable time. That's Roblox. Imagine being prompted every time your character dies to spend a dollar to skip having to wait 60 seconds to respawn. That's Roblox. Imagine a game taking over your screen when you try to exit it and having it tell you that you need to pay money to exit the game. That's Roblox. Imagine offering players the ability to pay money to bully other players and ruin their time. That's Roblox. Any of the worst, most manipulative monetization ideas you could come up with are a reality in Roblox. Some of the games in it practically bully kids into spending their in-game currency on them. It's super disgusting in general, and much worse when you remember a huge portion of Roblox players are ages 7-12.
Then, of course, there's the whole "they knew there were groups of child predators operating out in the open on the platform but didn't do anything about it for a long time" thing. They knew about all of this. Anyone engaged with the platform who tried to bring attention to the issue was banned rather than listened to. It took the mainstream media catching a whiff of what was going on then lawmakers threatening legal action for Roblox to finally make even a token gesture towards cleaning the platform up and getting rid of the people blatantly trying to groom children.
Roblox is one of those things where the more you learn about it, the more you believe that it should be shut down. The people operating it have been given ample time to clean up their act but haven't. We need a video game equivalent of a restaurant getting shut down by a health inspector just so it can be done to Roblox. They've been warned and the problems have been known for years. If they still won't deal with them then they shouldn't be allowed to operate as a business anymore.
3. EA. This one's a bummer. As much as I don't like modern EA, they're a historic games company who have a massive catalog of influential games. Even in the last few years despite their extremely dumb CEO they've done some good things. They've been notably good about releasing their catalog of old games with fixes to make them work on modern PCs. Have they been perfect releases? No, but at least they're doing something rather than letting old games languish with no legal means of obtaining them.
But then there's Andrew Wilson and everything else modern EA that makes them such a mess. Their CEO is yet another AI-brained business idiot who is incapable of reading the room. The company's direction in recent times has been troubling as they've been largely going all-in on their sports monetization stuff while releasing fewer and fewer new products. Now it seems like they're about to get bought by people I'd much rather didn't own them and then likely broken up and sold off.
As a more personal one, EA also have destroyed Codemasters, whose games I've played for over a decade now. The latest F1 by all accounts is good but the entire team that made their rally racing games has either been laid off or merged into the F1 team. Their rally racing games were exceptionally good so this is a big loss for me. More frustratingly, they also stopped supporting the most recent rally game, EA Sports WRC, despite the game being in a broken state. In usual EA fashion, they forced the team working on it to add Windows-only anti-cheat to it less than a year after first selling it, killing support for all the people who played it on Linux or Steam Decks. They added that anti-cheat to the game to protect the leaderboards. They did so without ever addressing the real problem: the leaderboards were already broken because they never reset them after patching the game to remove unintended corner cuts, meaning the top ladder times are literally impossible to beat anyway so nobody paid attention to them. So they stopped all Linux and Steam OS support to improperly fix an issue, screwing over a bunch of people who already had paid for the game months earlier.
EA is a major pillar of games and their current trajectory is a really troubling sign for the health of the games industry.
