Basically, who's turned you into their fanboy/girl in the world of games?

for me it would have to be two companies: CD PROJEKT RED for the Witcher and Taleworlds for Mount and Blade.

I'd be happy to explain reasoning but I'm terrible at putting it into words.


Anyways, happy discussion.... please try not to rip on eachother for their choices. (which I'm sure is bound to happen!)

Valve and Frictional games

Developer Love:
CD Projekt for no DRM. I'm still on The Witcher 1, but I like it.

Bioware - From their oldest to their newest games, there's always something good to it. I hate some of the stuff they do, but they cram some hate into very tastey morsels. I hate their EA-ification, but I hope that in the end it turns out for the better. I've loved the Dragon Ages and I'm excited about a Frostbyte Dragon Age.



Publisher Love:
Paradox-published games are always budget-feeling titles, but I love them all. From Mount and Blade to Warlock to Magicka, they just hit true for me every time.

Publisher Hate:
EA for a snowball of lies about Sim City (city size limitations, reasons for on-line connection, lies about server-side calculations, how sophisticated the AI works) and taking servers off-line a year after a game's release.

When it comes to First Person, Non-Combat Horror games Black Curtain Studios is where its at.

Ross Tunney (New Reality Games, aka Studio69) is one of my favourite devs. He works on the Data Hacker series and had a few Kickstarter projects, which is where I discovered him. He's doing a great job at developing the games and communicating about them.

I recently became a fan of Artifex Mundi. I played a few of their games (all those which are available on Android) and haven't found one yet which disappointed me. They may not be perfect, but they are consistently enjoyable, which is a lot to say about games.

Back in the day, i was a hopeless Blizzard fanboy. WarCraft II turned me into an RTS junkie for most of my childhood and teen years.

I don't think I've ever followed a pre-release game closer than I did WarCraft III.

But that was pretty much the end of it. Blizz went on to make WoW (and I never had any interest in multi-player gaming). Then news about StarCraft II trickled in, and I was back. I bought WoL on Day 1, played it through twice.

Then I went back to school, didn't touch the game for a few months. When I decided to get back into it, I had to endure 2 hours of patching, at the end of which I found out I could no longer log into my Battle.net client offline.
Then about 6 months down the road Blizz made the announcement about Diablo III being always-online. And that was the last straw. I turned my back on Blizzard and I've never looked back.

Currently, my favourite Dev are CDPRed, because the Witcher games are great.

re: Publlishers. without any doubt, the best publisher of all times for me was Eidos. They've published 3 of my favourite game series-Legacy of Kain, Hitman, and Deus Ex. Recently, I've added Thief to that list. Not to mention single gems like Urban Chaos or Anachronox. Eidos was the publisher who took a lot of risks with niche IPs and i loved them for it.

Sadly, after their merger with Square Enix, few of the titles I like have gone anywhere good.

I like Paradox, I am grateful that 1C exists to bring me more crazy unpolished Eastern European games. 2K's pretty alright in that they haven't really done anything major to make me despise them.

EDIT: Until they went out of business, I adored GSC. I got hooked on Cossacks, and then discovered S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

I don't really know, but i sure like Double fine and Square Enix games, they haven't let me down yet

Obisidian, despite their failings (though not all of them their own fault). I've loved Bioware, but EA took "care" of them. After the first Mass Effect it was all downhill.

LaLaLaLarian! :)

I don't care too much about the developers; history has shown that good ones can go down the shitter real fast, and that shit developers can occasionally do something right. That said, I have more faith in CD Projekt Red (no-DRM, The Witcher series), Larian (for doing Dragon Commander without outside help) and Obsidian (for everything, despite everything).

EDIT: And Valve for Portal.

inXile & Obsidian spring to mind.

And I know I'll get some flack for this, but Ubisoft from the big guys. I just love how they seem to listen/learn from feedback (for the games themselves, not for the DRM policy).

1. Irrational Games
2. CD Projekt RED
3. Bethesda Game Studios

Every developer I have ever loved turned to utter garbage. So I do not allow myself to expect much from any developer now. I used to really, really love Monolith though.

I like CD Projekt for making GOG.com and keeping it DRM-free. I like developers that let me fully play their PC games without Steam. I despise each and every developer or publisher or game company that puts everything exclusively on Steam; that makes me sick to my stomach.