Ever been really bugged by a video game?
It happens. A game is a meticulously crafted piece of digital clockwork, designed to appeal to and thrill or charm a broad audience of gamers. Even the best game is sure to have story or gameplay elements that irk somebody. And then there are the bugs themselves: crashes, freezes, gameplay errors and — uh — monster babies (among other visual glitches).
Yet games are what we’re passionate about. So when the game in which you’ve invested money, time and practice bugs you, you wanna shout about it, which leads to the most complained about video game of all: Twitter!
The pandemic was a boom time both for gaming and for gaming frustration. While sales boomed, developers battled against the odds to deliver the games they’d promised, often ending up late (Gran Turismo 7, Deathloop) or flawed or both (Halo Infinite). Guide Strats got curious about which video games have bugged us the most lately, so we analyzed over three million tweets to find the ones that have roused the strongest negative sentiments on Twitter.
What We Did
Guide Strats compiled a list of the most popular and notable games for each console and genre and retrieved 3,051,583 tweets related to these games. Next, we analyzed each tweet using the HuggingFace module and pre-trained CardiffNLP sentiment analysis model. We labeled a tweet as negative if the model returned a negativity score greater than 0.5 and calculated the percentage of negative tweets for each game.
Key Findings
- The most complained about video game overall is Angry Birds, for which 30.5% of tweets express a negative sentiment.
- Halo Infinite is the most complained about Xbox game, with a 24.5% negativity rating.
- The Last of Us Remastered is the most complained about game on PlayStation 5 (16.7%).
- Mobile games are the most maddening, with an average negativity rating of 19.1% across the ten most complained about games.
- Babylon’s Fall (25.3%), Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (20.06%) and Pokémon Legends: Arceus (18.92%) have the highest negativity ratings in the RPG genre.
- The MMOs with the highest negativity rating are New World (19.45%), Runescape (17.73%) and Star Wars: The Old Republic (15.02%).
- Escape From Tarkov (25.48%) is the shooter with the highest negativity rating. Closely followed by Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 (25.05%) and Halo Infinite (24.51%).
- The sports games with the highest negativity rating are Madden 23 (22.54%), UFC 4 (20.89%) and NHL 23 (16.27%).
- F1 22 (18.76%), Shift 2 (15.33%) and iRacing (15.12%) have the highest negativity ratings in the driving genre.
Xbox: Halo Infinitely Frustrating
Halo Infinite is, by most accounts, an excellent game, boasting a Metascore of 87 and an average user rating of 7.9. But its messy release strategy led to the game’s “death by a thousand cuts and a couple gaping wounds,” according to veteran critic Wes Fenlon.
First, this much anticipated sixth Halo was a year late. Next, the trailer was underwhelming. Then the game launched without key features, such as campaign co-op and Forge. Subsequently, gamers quickly grew tired of the limits on the multiplayer option.
And then — well, a year of patches, updates and bonus materials that were variously fluffed, flawed, or… underwhelming. Somewhere under the mess, there’s a great game in Halo Infinite. But you can see why it’s so often complained about by Xbox gamers.
PlayStation 5: The Last of Us Flaws Remade and Remastered
Things are tight in the fight to be the most complained-about PS5 game. The Last of Us Remastered takes it by a notch. Wait — why was there a remaster in the first place? Explains Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells: “The graphic fidelity has been turned up to eleven. We’ve got 1080p, we’re pushing the draw distances further, we’re creating higher resolution character models, better lighting, better shadows.”
Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea. “Unfortunately, the limitations of the original game are put under more of a microscope with the improved definition, and some textures and items look a little blocky and unnatural,” wrote one reviewer. Meanwhile, regular citizens were just as irked by the cost of paying for multiple versions.
But TLOUR is a mere 1.1% more complained about than second-placed Stray (which is, some say, just The Last of Us with cats). It is worth mentioning that some of the negative Stray tweets are actually aimed at real-life pet cats who keep cuddling up to the screen mid-game.
Nintendo Switch: Breath of the Wild “Not Actually Perfect”
Nintendo games seem to go out of their way to be lovable — and the most complained about, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, barely breaks a 20% negativity rate on Twitter. In fact, one of the most complained about things about Breath of the Wild seems to be how overwhelmingly positive people are about it when, of course, it has flaws (generic gameplay, slow processing, etc.).
“THIS GAME IS NOT PERFECT,” yells one hurt gamer on Metacritic. “Let me explain why this game broke my heart into a million different pieces which I won’t be able to pick up off the floor because this game no longer features heart pieces…”
Mobile: The Real Angry Bird is the Angry Bird Inside
Like a bird whose eggs keep being stolen by green pigs, Angry Birds players are angry. The game is the most infuriating on Earth, with nearly a third of all tweets about it proving negative. But perhaps the thing that Angry Birds games are most frustrated with is… themselves?
“AB’s main focus is to waste your time and it succeeds completely in fulfilling this need,” writes one player of “the most lame game in history,” which he still took time to review. “There’s no real challenge to it and you just keep launching birds into little forts trying to hurt the piggies inside them,” writes another, after a long session of launching birds into forts: “There’s no motive to ever open the app again other than to collect all the little stars (which i did) and achieve absolutely nothing.” Which he did.
Games Smell Passion Like Dogs Smell Fear
It’s been emotional. But if the feelings aroused when playing a game leave you exhausted, imagine how the folks that made the game must feel. As Scott Rogers — designer of God of War, Maximo, and Pac-Man World — advises fellow developers, these competing sets of emotions are not so far apart as you might think:
“Gamers can feel when developers are passionate about their games. They can smell it like a dog smells fear. Don’t be afraid to hold onto your unique vision: just be aware that it may not turn out exactly how you envisioned.”
Of course, feedback is how developers… well, develop. And with the price that some games ask, it’s not unreasonable that gamers should share their response (as long as they do so reasonably). After all, there’s one feature in the big’ol game called Twitter that video game designers won’t complain about: the mute button.
METHODOLOGY & SOURCES
We first compiled a seed list of the most popular and notable games for each console and genre. We then retrieved a total of 3,051,583 tweets related to each game.
Next, we analyzed each tweet using the HuggingFace module and pre-trained CardiffNLP sentiment analysis model. We labeled a tweet as negative if the model returned a negativity score greater than 0.5. We could then calculate the percentage of negative tweets found for each game and could rank the games accordingly.
The data was collected in February 2023.
