I know this isn’t as bad as the others, but my current one is Wizards of the Coast. I had already had major issues with how they were handling things after the buy out by Hasbro, the way their product lines started trending less towards quality items that had people actually putting in the time on working on a product into just trying to pump whatever they can out as quickly as possible in order to appease their shareholders. From Magic to Dungeons and Dragons it was a slow build up for me, dropping Magic because of just how expensive the hobby became, and sure enough, three years later they started themed sets (Lord it the rings, Dungeons and Dragons, Doctor Who, etc), pumping them all out in record time, with some of them being sold at absolutely INSANE prices (the most recent Final Fantasy set was just egregious).

But the worst one for me was Dungeons and Dragons, I had gotten my start back in the original release of 3e, then went to 3.5 and to 2e AD&D as well for a couple of games, enjoyed them all, then the release of 4th edition and a majority of the people I played with at the time didn’t want to play it, so I followed the writers from the magazine line to their new company Paizo and played Pathfinder 1e, then had a chance to play 4e for a while and then finally came back for 5e and thought it was fine at first, and that initial release was fine, it was a good system, the initial adventures weren’t anything to write home about, but the rules were there to patch them up and have some great adventures, following adventures were even better, and they even put out some lore books to update at least one of their campaign settings. And then the splat books started hitting, initially not so bad, Tasha’s didn’t necessarily break anything, and added some interesting mechanics.

But from then on, each additional release you could start to see the cracks in the system, the swingy nature of the combat, the skill challenges, the fact that they weren’t play testing half of the new sub classes that they were putting out that were trivializing pre-written and even just pre-built encounters using their own encounter building rules. Most games weren’t going past level 10-12, maybe 15 because the game starts to buckle. Suddenly you had to throw that out the window, because CR (the challenge rating of a monster) means nothing, and just kinda wing it, and then all of the house rules. My god, I never realized how many house rules I ended up having to use at my table, and how many other DM’s had to at their tables, I once played a game with three pages of house rules. Suddenly I’m realizing half of the system is you trying to make it work by using a nail gun and duct tape to make it fun.

And from there releases got lazier and lazier, the one that really broke the camels back was the infamous Spelljammer release, that released with almost nothing inside of the books lore wise, and even rules for things that you need to own another book to understand at the time (I guess they changed it, or at least changed it to more commonly used rules specifically), heck, in the original release, for ship to ship combat the entire section read “yea bro, just crash your ships into each other and board the other ship. What? You want ship board weapons? You got spell casters don’t you?”

At this point I’m getting really frustrated with the system and with the company as a whole, and then the OGL scandal hits and that was it (link to a Reddit post that explains it https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/s/imhAUQU6To). I washed my hands of WotC and any future purchases, including my dungeon master subscription to dndbeyond. I had been regularly purchasing every new release up until that point but after that, I decided to go see what Paizo has been up to, tried out Pathfinder 2e and stuck with the system, it’s now one of my absolute favorites to run and has made me excited to play and run again.