Role Ending Misdemeanor / Video Games

There is a two-week waiting period (after the termination of a role) before an example can be added. This ensures the job loss is accurately reported, actually sticks and avoids knee-jerk reactions.

---

Game developers and development houses

• Retro Studios founder Jeff Spangenberg was forced out of his own company by Nintendo months before the release of its debut title — Metroid Prime — when Nintendo realized what he had and hadn't been doing throughout not just the Troubled Production of Prime, but every other project at his studio since its inception. Spangenberg was frequently absent as both a developer and a manager, instead spending his time and Nintendo's money enjoying the high life with yacht parties, strip clubs, and drugs — one story shared by several former Retro employees relayed how during the chaotic pre-production phase of a project that would eventually be cancelled so they could work on Prime, Spangenberg one day pulled up to work in a new Ferrari he won at an auction, having done so solely to outbid John Carmack. Nintendo eventually learned about Spangenberg's behavior in the summer of 2001 because of a website that he made documenting all his latest partying, photo-ops with topless woman, and cocaine habits, which turned out to be hosted on Retro's own servers. Due to his high position in Retro, he wasn't immediately fired, but Nintendo bought out all his shares (reclassifying Retro as a first party developer and division of Nintendo) and Spangenberg was quietly forced to leave. His sole work in gaming afterwards was founding Topheavy Studios and publishing its only title in 2004: the controversial, oft-banned adult party game The Guy Game.
• The computer game Paranautical Activity was pulled from Steam on October 20, 2014, when its creator Mike Maulbeck saw that the announcement of its completed release still had the "Early Access" banner, and responded by venting about Steam on his Twitter account—which culminated in threatening to kill Valve Software CEO Gabe Newell. Maulbeck soon apologized for this and resigned from his studio, Code Avarice, in an attempt to restore goodwill between it and Valve, although he has since been rehired.
• As a result of suing users, including videogame pundit James Stephanie Sterling, for libel over negative reviews on Steam, Valve had the Romine brothers' company Digital Homicide's titles removed completely from the service and refuses to allow other titles by the developers on their platform. While the publisher has attempted to rebrand itself under a number of pseudonyms (namely, LootToot Games), they have still been stuck peddling DRM-free copies of their games on smaller distribution platforms, with nowhere near the reach they once had.
• Sonic the Hedgehog fangame Sonic World nearly suffered a work-ending misdemeanor in October 2018, when the leader of the development team, Ozcrash, was rumored to have committed "illegal acts", which is alleged to be related to rape^note Beforehand, Ozcrash kept harassing his fans for liking Sonic World and not his music. The team was completely outraged by this, to the point they shut down the site to disassociate themselves from Ozcrash. Eventually they restored the site and resumed development, still keeping distance away from Ozcrash. Ozcrash, meanwhile, blanked his website, YouTube channel, denied the allegations, and withdrew from public, before returning online two years later to announce his lawsuit for defamation.
  (site's "About Us" page) It is also required to give credit for Ozcrash's work on this game; however we do not associate with him in any way nor do we agree or condone anything that Ozcrash did involving the contents of "goddamnit.zip"
• In Minecraft, while at that point the "role" in question was merely the logo "Made by Notch"^note The nickname of Markus Persson, the game's original creator who sold Minecraft to Microsoft and ended his involvement with the game's development in 2014 that appeared when starting up the game, Microsoft released an update in early 2019 that removed said text from the game (Notch is still listed in the credits, however). While no reason for this was given at the time, many saw it as Microsoft distancing themselves from Notch's increasingly controversial public profile brought on by his tweets expressing support for conspiracy theories and/or bigotry. Microsoft confirmed this and took it even further later that year when they declined to invite Notch to their 10 year anniversary celebration for Minecraft, citing his controversial statements as the reason why.
• Ron Johnson, the Global Head of Consumer Products at Riot Games, resigned shortly after a Facebook post he made blaming George Floyd's murder by police on his "criminal lifestyle" and claiming with absolutely no evidence that Floyd was on his way to kill a child at the time of his death, resulting in an investigation that he beat to the punch.
• Several allegations of manipulation, gaslighting, and grooming caused Lange (the creator of Sonic Utopia) to be banned from Sonic Fan Games HQ. Likewise, the owner, Perfect Chaos Zero, was accused of the same things, which forced him to step down.
• Roblox:
  • MisterObvious was once a respected fan animator in the community who was loved for his comedic animations. His videos were so popular that they would win him two Bloxy awards in 2013 and 2014 respectively. This reputation would not last as in June 2017, images emerged that exposed his predatory behavior towards underage girls on Discord. Public opinion of him immediately changed, and the legacy he left from the past was completely destroyed. MisterObvious would later deactivate all of his social media.
  • Explode1 was well known for creating some of the most well-received games on the site. He was especially loved for his high-quality adventure series: Adventure Forward: Star Savior and Super Paper Roblox. Both series combined spanned a total of four games and amassed millions of visits. However, in September 2018, multiple allegations against Explode1 were released to the public. Several people, including some of his fans, friends, and contributors, brought to light his inappropriate behavior. These included sending people to bully others, manipulating his fans, and, most notably, his sexual behavior towards underage girls. This culminated in Roblox banning his account and plans for a third Adventure Forward game were canceled, as well as his games beginning to become broken with Roblox updates due to him no longer being able to update them. While Explode1 himself left Roblox after the controversy, most of his games have since been restored and re-released.
• Lab Zero Games, the developer behind Skullgirls and Indivisible, went bust in September 2020 after the CEO, Mike Zaimont, let go of the studio's remaining staff following a mass exodus that summer caused by several serious allegations, including sexual assault, being brought forward against Zaimont.
• Longtime Blizzard developer Jesse McCree was fired from the company after Activision Blizzard was caught up in a massive sexual harassment scandal in mid-2021, with him being outed as part of a photo and group chat showing him and several other devs involved in the "Cosby Suite" (a hotel suite at BlizzCon nicknamed after that Cosby, alleged to have been a place for them to gather women for dubious sexual purposes). Not only was he booted from his lead designer role on the upcoming Diablo IV, the major Overwatch character named directly after him^note The story goes that as Overwatch and the character were first being developed, his name was put in as a placeholder, but was eventually kept permanently after it kept beating every other name they brainstormed for him was renamed Cole Cassidy.
• Longtime World of Warcraft developer Alex Afrasiabi quietly left Blizzard-Activision in 2020 due to his alleged sexual misconduct and sexism at the company. This and other accusations against major figures of the company took the gaming world by storm in the summer of 2021.
• The Friday Night Funkin' modding community has been subject to this numerous times.
  • Prolific mod producer AetherDX (most famous for working on Matt$'s VS Cyrix, literally every fnf mod ever, and Vs. Kiryu) lost all of her associations with the community, had her upcoming mod Vs. Akira cancelled, and disappeared from the internet after several members of the community came forward and revealed a litany of evidence not only documenting her fostering of abusive and manipulative relationships, but also exposing her as being the mastermind behind a Content Leak of Monday Dusk Monolith and generally contributing nothing to most of the teams she was signed onto while still pressuring them to put out work.
  • Diffraktor, the composer of the song "Dreams of Roses", was outed for being in a sexual relationship with a minor. As such, the team behind Doki Doki Takeover! cut ties with them, and the mod was temporarily taken down until they found a new composer to make a new song, that being "Bara No Yume".
  • The creator of Friday Night Funkin', But Bad deleted all of their social media as well as the mod itself when it was discovered that they were making NSFW art of Ron and Bob from literally every fnf mod ever, as well as of a minor... while being a minor themselves (12 years old to be exact). They ended up deleting their social media and the mod itself, and the mod was removed from the modding wiki's Hall of Fame due to the incident.
  • AmorAltra, the creator of Vs Bob And Bosip, has been outed for multiple vile behaviors, such as forcing devs to work on the mod with no regard to their mental health, talking to a user who is known for being a pedophile, and using his alt account on social media to stalk minors and make NSFW art of himself, Blu, and Mini (despite Mini being only 17). After all these allegations, Amor made a response, and a majority of the developers have disassociated with Amor. Because of all this, any future updates for the mod, including crossovers, have been discontinued and the mod itself has been deleted from both Gamejolt and Gamebanana.
  • Revie_03, the director of Vs Sonic.exe and creator of EXE, was falsely accused of grooming at least 2 minors and emotionally abusing the fellow developers of the mod in early January 2022. She, along with EXE, were removed from the mod, although the art of EXE was kept in game through an art gallery as a tribute to late artist Divide. She had recently been proven innocent however (with the alleged victim confirming the supposed "proof" was hoax), which in turn led to one of the accusers being exposed as the one who groomed a minor herself.
  • In February 2022, Star_Lyt stepped down as director of Sunday Night Suicide and had his upcoming mods Vs. Kai and Vs. Robotnik left on permanent hiatus after numerous allegations of pedophilia, introducing minors to fat fetish art, and abusive behavior towards team members, including a voice actor who had previously auditioned for Vs. Kai. One of his many response videos, which infamously featured a clip of Peter Griffin at a newsdesk while he reads off the drama involving Star_Lyt, was seen as callous and insincere by the majority of the FNF fanbase. Months later, in May 2022, Star_Lyt deleted his YouTube channel and transferred ownership of SNS to someone else before seemingly disappearing off the internet entirely. A more in-depth analysis can be found here and here.
  • Friday Night Funkin': ENTITY: TheInnuendo, the mod's composer and basis for A.G.O.T.I., once made multiple rude and anti-LGBT comments on Twitter; while initially trying to pass it off as him being in-character, the wildfire had spread much too far, with even other members of the modding team receiving harassment from people furious with his remarks. As a result, the rest of the team had cut ties with him, and SugarRatio redesigned AGOTI, turning him into Aldryx Andromeda; after he rebranded, apologized for his actions and gave ownership of A.G.O.T.I to SugarRatio, the team decided to keep the mod as-is, with Aldryx becoming an entirely different character altogether.
  • Version 2 of Friday Night Funkin' Lullaby initially had a different director until Banbuds had to take over again due to the person he handed the mod off to, Revie_03, being accused of allegations mentioned in the above Vs Sonic.exe entry.
  • Illegal Instruction:
    • A mod-ending misdemeanor in this case. The higher-ups of this mod’s creation, including Averyavary, the director and creator of Duke and Chaotix, and Kenji, the lead artist and Curse’s creator, were essentially kicked out of the EXE community after it was exposed that they were still talking to JesterFrog after she was exposed for being a child groomer, and the two manipulating the dev team into thinking having Jester on the team was okay despite her crimes. In Avery’s case, he had rejoined the community and uncancelled the mod alongside a few other people...only to get outed again, leaving the mod canceled for good.
    • HassenX Animations, one of the composers for the mod, was booted from the team following controversies surrounding him, with every song he had worked on being scrapped or planned to be remade.
  • NuSky + Skyverse: Due to the allegations of grooming against them, kitsuneskulls lost ownership of Sky, which is now held by 01Alexander10.
  • Most if not all of the mod team of Times & Tribulations—Vs. Omega left after it came to light that Eye4l-P committed multiple misconducts against minors, including drawing NSFW art for one and grooming another. While the mod is still available to download and Eye4l-P has stated that it isn't canceled outright, it's very unlikely to see any future progress due to his actions.
  • Vs. Mouse:
    • After many controversies arose against them and members left the team because of it, the Novatos Team lost ownership of the mod, with the remaining members forming a new team called the Rookies Team, who now have taken said ownership.
    • Scott, the initial director of the Rookies Team, was fired after being exposed for tracing sprites, being toxic, drawing NSFW art, and leaking content from the mod. As such, all of the content that he worked on will be kept exclusively in the leaked 2.6 build and replaced in the 3.0 update.
• Tripwire Interactive CEO John Gibson stepped down in September 2021 after massive public backlash over voicing his support for Texas' Senate Bill 8, which essentially eliminated legal abortion in the state in defiance of Roe v. Wade. Within hours, Shipwright Studios, one of the company's biggest development partners, announced they would no longer be working with Tripwire. He also faced heavy opposition within the company as well, which released a notably stern and angry statement that he "disregarded the values of our whole team, our partners and much of our broader community."
• Five Nights at Freddy's had multiple cases of role-ending misdemeanor, including both those involved officially with the series and prominent members of the fan community:
  • Dormitabis and Insanity lead designer Blackout (also known as InsaneHavocSoul, Nicchi, and Phi), was exposed by Nocturnum of Radiance Team for grooming minors and making offensive posts on a Twitter account. In response, Blackout went completely radio silent and the remastered version of Dormitabis was put on hold, until Expelled Studios' efforts in making a remastered version came to light in May 2022. This controversy may also explain why Dormitabis was not included in the Fazbear Fanverse Initiative.
  • Jonochrome, creator of One Night at Flumpty's, was exposed in November 2021 after a Twitlonger was released by a user accusing him of being in a relationship with her when she was 13 and he was 20. He would make a statement where he admitted the accusations, and said that he was seeking mental help. He has been inactive online since then.
  • LadyFiszi, one of the main artists who did covers for the Five Nights at Freddy's: Fazbear Frights books and various assets for the games got into hot water in 2019 after making a series of transphobic comments. In February 2023, it was discovered that she took part in various Nazi-themed groups on DeviantART and wrote various stories involving William Afton and Scott Cawthon engaging in inappropriate acts towards children, even going as far as slipping in a reference to said story in official merchandise (and even in a drawing seen in the office of Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator). When this was posted on Reddit, Scott Cawthon stated that she's been dropped.
  • Ramenov, Mechlus and Ultranite, who made JR's, Project Readjusted and Chomper's respectively were discovered to be a part of a private Discord server called "The Pear". This group aims to collect and share personal and private information on various members of the FNaF community (including Scott Cawthon himself), as well as various leaks on FNaF fangames, Fanverse projects and titles from other indie games such as Choo-Choo Charles - with the plan to blackmail the victims and eventually leak it anonymously. To make matters worse, it was revealed that they planned to rig GameJolt's system by mass downvoting all of the FNaF fangames with alt accounts while boosting theirs, as well as making a series of homophobic, sexist and transphobic comments towards Scott's wife and various Fanverse members. When this got out, GameJolt and the official subreddit took action against the offenders, and the aforementioned Chomper's, which was initially planned to be a part of the Fanverse was booted off entirely.
  • Squimpus McGrimpus, the creator of the popular FNAF VHS series, was accused of grooming an underage user in their Discord server in March 2023. They ultimately released a statement admitting to it, and offering apologies, before becoming inactive with many other creators and friends of theirs' cutting ties.
  • Following Phisnom's stream of the Ruin DLC, someone on Twitter responded to his tweet over how boring he thought the game was with his stream being boring. A few self-proclaimed fans of Phisnom's decided to harass them over it, sending them death threats and pictures of gore. When Phisnom was informed about the situation, he not only refused to stop them but made fun of the situation by making fake apologies with rickrolls in them.^note The FNAF-themed rickroll in question had previously appeared in a post by Kane Carter at a point when certain individuals rumored if the Fanverse was on the verge of cancellation and was done to troll them. While he only did this due to underestimating the seriousness of what was going on, this combined with his general negativity towards the series and the fandom as a whole proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back, causing major backlash. Phisnom removed himself from development of Five Nights at Freddy's Plus shortly afterwards and has since been banned from associating with the franchise in any way.
  • Five Nights at Sonic's:
    • Universal_Foxes, the voice of the Mario variants in Maniac Mania, had to be recast a few months before the PLUS remake getting announced after allegations of pedophilia.
    • Bew, one of the former members of Team Cyantix got exposed for having a sexual relationship with a minor in 2021, this lead to Phantom Bew getting removed from Maniac Mania Infinite and other easter eggs relating to him.
    • Both Piggy and Bunn were kicked off the dev team for Maniac Mania INFINITE in July of 2022 after they were found out to have groomed several underaged fans.
    • Smiler Furcifer deleted all of his social media accounts and disappeared from the internet in November 2023 after his NSFW alt account, which contained lewd drawings of canonically underage characters, was exposed.
• Indie developer Aggro Crab parted ways with their community manager, who went by the handle Luulubuu, in August 2021 after numerous allegations of scamming people, abusive and manipulative behavior, not delivering on already paid for art commissions, lying about personal connections (like working with Capcom), sexual harassment, stealing review codes from outlets, and eventually getting revealed that Luulubuu was actually a man all along! She has deactivated her Twitter account some time later in the year after apologizing. All of this is compiled in a single Twitter thread.
• Sean "Obelusk" Lusk, who initially conceptualized Project: Eden's Garden, was forced to step down from his position as director in October 2021, days after he was exposed as having acted abusively towards staff members (with much of the brunt being directed at the writers) and volunteers. Although Lusk issued an apology coinciding with his resignation, his Twitter account was subsequently wiped clean - none of his few remaining Tweets mention Eden's Garden.
• In 2015, NomnomNami learned that her at-the-time relationship partner, Yoyo, had been misleading others about his age and was actually in his early teens while Nami was currently in her early twenties; she immediately broke up with him and halted development of the visual novel series they had been working on. This wasn't the only consequence, as in early 2022, Yoyo made a public statement that Nami and others in their social circle had groomed him during their time together; Nami responded with a public apology, but it was still considered her responsibility to confirm things like Yoyo's age before the relationship went as far as it did, which led to Nami losing a position at the Future Club game development studio (where she had contributed animation work for games such as Skullgirls). However, Nami continues to make independent games to make ends meet.
• RuneScape had two high profile dismissals of JMods (Jagex Moderators/Game Devs):
  • In 2018, Mod Jed, who was best known for his work on several quests in Old School RuneScape as well as Old School's mobile app, was dismissed after abusing moderator privileges to defraud players of hundreds of millions of GP.
  • In 2021, Mod Ian, best known for working on much of the game's sound design and composing over 600 tracks, was dismissed due to allegations of sexually assaulting a minor, which he eventually got convicted for.
• Sergey Burkatovsky (SerB), the creative director of World of Tanks, was fired from Wargaming in February 2022 after making social media posts in support of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
• The game Domina was de-listed from Steam on September 1st, 2022 after its developer, Dolphin Barn Incorporated, made a transphobic rant against transgender Twitch streamer and activist Keffals on the patch notes of one of its updates. They previously had already been banned from the Steam forums due to abusive behaviour.
• Following a series of controversies that affected Kindly Beast Studios (including the mass layoff of several employees and a lawsuit against their merch company), Mike Mood, co-creator of the Bendy franchise, went completely uncredited in the final release of Bendy and the Dark Revival.
• On January 20, 2023, Corin Simpson-Bryars, a server engineer for multiple Rhythm Game-related projects, was met with allegations of sexual abuse, resulting in severe backlash towards him from the Western rhythm game community at large. As a result, he was let go from or resigned from many of those projects:
  • On January 22, 2023, Corin was removed from the administration team for RemyWiki (a fan-operated BEMANI wiki), which then migrated to another server, one not handled by him.
  • On January 30, 2023, lowiro, the development team for Arcaea, issued a statement confirming that he resigned from his position and left the company.
• Marisa Lago, a Spanish Doom mapper and gameplay modder known for Codename Demolitionist, was banned from ZDoom forums in March 2023 following the allegations of grooming a minor online back in 2018, with the admin staff of said forums also coming under fire when they were accused of trying to sweep Marisa's actions under the rug, with the moderators involved being let go. The person who levelled the accusations was credibly accused of being an abuser and pedophile himself, who likely has intentionally misrepresented the situation to get back at her, but by the time this came out the hate mob was already too far gone to be calmed down, not helped by the Zdoom mods screwing up situation further.
• While the modding scene for Doki Doki Literature Club! isn't as large as other games, there have still been multiple controversies surrounding mod creators:
  • CampinKarl (who also went by the handle CampinKate) was a very high-profile figure in the modding community and was best known for moderating the DDLC Modding subreddit and discord, as well as creating the mod Monika Before Story. However, in 2021, it was revealed that CampinKarl had been doing NSFW roleplay with someone who was a minor at the time. Because of this, his accounts were banned from the subreddit and discord, and all download links to Monika Before Story were also banned from the sites. This also caused several of the subreddit's moderators to leave, as it was discovered that some of the moderators had known about CampinKarl's actions but decided not to ban him due to his prominence in the community.
  • The mod Just Yuri (a mod that was effectively Monika After Story, but with Yuri instead of Monika) and its creator were both banned from the community because of images showing a Discord conversation where the creator was making sexual advances on a minor. While the mod was briefly un-banned due to the mod team banning the creator from the project, the ban was swiftly reinstated once it was discovered that a large amount of the people working on the project were aware of the creator's conduct, but decided to turn a blind eye to it and blame the victim until it became known by the wider community. Due to this, the creator of a similar mod titled Forever and Ever (the same as Just Yuri, but with Sayori instead) took the mod from the Just Yuri team so it wouldn't be banned as well.
  • In 2020, the Monika-focused mod Emerald Heart and its creator were both banned from the community due to one user providing proof that the adult mod author had been in a relationship with the user when he was just 15 years old.
  • A group called TeamAI was very prominent in the community, making multiple mods that were overall well-received. However, in 2020, a large amount of drama within the group's Discord server caused several members to be banned, culminating in claims that the leader of the group had encouraged a relationship between a minor and an adult. While the moderators initially assumed that the leader was a minor who didn't know any better (and as such only gave them a minor scolding), it later came to light that the team's leader was very much an adult. Due to this, all of the team's mods were banned from being shared in the community, and the leader was banned from the community's subreddit and Discord.
  • On 24 December 2023, the user MrZeraTheMant, creator of the Yuri-focused mod Our Castle Walls, was banned from the DDLC modding subreddit and had his mod added to the subreddit's blacklist after MrZera's cousin revealed MrZera had groomed him when he was 17.
• One that became a work-ending misdemeanor: Blaize Mayes, creator, director and main artist of the Undertale Fan Remake Undertale: Bits and Pieces was arrested on November 9th, 2023 for possession of child pornography. After news of the arrest was made, the remaining development team announced he would be removed from the project and there would be an indefinite hold on development as they decided what to do from there. Two days later, they ultimately decided to cease development permanently, publicly releasing what was finished of the next planned update as an unstable build and moving onto a new Undertale fan remake project, Project Harmony.
• Neph, a friend of the developer of the Pokémon Crystal ROM hack Pokémon Crystal Clear, had an NPC based on him that sold you a house and doubled as an Elite 4 member. In 2021, it was discovered that he held unironic Nazi beliefs, which he expressed in a private server of his. As such, all references to him were removed beginning in version 2.4.0.

Voice/acting/musical talent

• Two Like a Dragon voice actors fell victim to this towards the end of The New '10s:
  • Hiroki Narimiya, who voiced Masayoshi Tanimura in Yakuza 4, was accused of cocaine abuse in December 2016, and while the tech base at the time (2010) didn't allow for his parts to be replaced, Tanimura was remodelled and recast with Toshiki Masuda in the remastered version. Narimiya was later cleared of all charges, but he retired from the industry by that point.
  • Japanese actor Pierre Taki was arrested on cocaine charges in March 2019, and due to his involvement in Judgment, the game was temporarily pulled from stores and Sega deleted all tweets related to it even though the game had been released in Japan three months prior to this. Taki's character, Kyohei Hamura, was recast with Miō Tanaka, and the game was re-released a few months later in Japan, with this version being released overseas as well.
• The voice-overs Jon "JonTron" Jafari recorded for Yooka-Laylee were removed from the final game after numerous Twitter users demanded Playtonic remove him from the game after Jon expressed nativist and xenophobic views on Twitter, followed up by a particularly disastrous stream in the spring of 2017 where he tried to debate his political opinions in response to the tweets.
• The song "Subhuman", composed by Cody Matthew Johnson and featuring Suicide Silence, was intended to be Dante's battle theme in Devil May Cry 5. However, reports surfaced that lead singer Eddie Hermida had engaged in an emotionally manipulative and sexually inappropriate relationship with an underage fan. The resulting PR kerfuffle caused Capcom themselves to delete the song's music video from YouTube and edit out all instances of the song from new trailers and uploading an older one with the song removed. They later announced that they didn't know about the scandal until after Subhuman had been completed, and in no uncertain terms would be distancing themselves from the collaboration. Ultimately, the song was kept as Johnson had little-to-no involvement with the band or their controversies, with it being re-recorded with new vocals from Volumes vocalist Michael Barr.
• In July 2019, Chris Niosi admitted to a decades-long history of abuse towards partners and friends, including an incident where he disclosed his role as male Byleth in Fire Emblem: Three Houses on Discord in violation of Nintendo's non-disclosure agreement; these combined factors led Nintendo to recast him post-release with Zach Aguilar for the game's 1.0.2 update and Fire Emblem Heroes, who has continued to voice the character since.
• Cryaotic's roles as Oz and Liam de Lioncourt in Monster Prom were replaced for future games following his admittance to having online sexual interactions with underaged fans while he was dating his girlfriend.
• Following allegations of sexual assault and harassment in June 2020, Techland cut ties with game writer Chris Avellone for Dying Light 2: Stay Human.
• Ren Ozawa, who voiced Kazunari Miyoshi in A3, was fired from his agency AIS in December 2020 after reports revealed that he committed domestic abuse on his ex-girlfriend. Kazunari was eventually recast with Tomoru Akazawa, who played the character in the stage productions.
• Activision dropped voice actor Jeff Leach (best known as Ghost in Call of Duty: Warzone) in May 2021 after a video montage of him making sexist remarks on livestreams was brought to their attention. He claimed the clips were taken out of context and he was responding to a toxic troll, only to be met by a response that the kind of abusive language he used shouldn't be part of online gaming no matter who it's directed against.
• Quinton Flynn had his roles in World of Warcraft and No More Heroes III recast, and was not invited to a Metal Gear cast reunion stream, after numerous allegations of sexual misconduct with younger female fans were made public in late 2020. He was also not asked to reprise his role as Jhin in League of Legends following the scandal, with the character's appearance in Legends of Runeterra also being recast.
• Limited to China only, any Chinese-made games that feature Ai Kayano (notably Arknights, Azur Lane, and Girls' Frontline) were forced (by pressure of netizens) to remove her voice clips after she tweeted about her visit to the shrine complex that included the Yasukuni Shrine (a Shinto shrine that commemorates soldiers who died fighting for Japan, infamously including over 1,000 Imperial Japanese soldiers who committed war crimes such as the Nanjing Massacre and Unit 731) in February 2021.
• War Thunder developer Gaijin Entertainment severed ties to longstanding narrator Bruce Grant in May 2022 when it was revealed that Grant had narrated Russian state propaganda justifying the invasion of Ukraine. The straw that broke the snail's back was his support for misinformation about the Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 shootdown (namely, by repeating the debunked Russian claim that it was a Ukrainian aircraft shooting down the airliner, then changing his story to the also-debunked Russian claim of Ukranian air defenses being responsible for the shootdown).
• Rhythm Game music composer Ice resigned from Rayark in 2020 following backlash from mainland Chinese fans after he published a song with a hidden "Free Hong Kong" message (in reference to the 2020 Hong Kong protests). Ice's songs were removed from the Chinese version of Cytus II (although they are still available in other regional versions of the game, as the Chinese version is published by a third-party company) and when the Cytus II collaboration content was brought to the Chinese builds of maimai, his song "Entrance" was excluded. This only really affects his projects involving rhythm games released in China, as developers from other countries still welcome his contributions.
• Runa Narumi, most famous for her role as Yuika Mitsumine in THE iDOLM@STER: Shiny Colors, was exposed in late 2021 in a cheating scandal involving her trying to cheat on her current boyfriend with her ex-boyfriend, who had another girlfriend at the time. Her activities were suspended (officially due to poor health), she was removed from the voice actor idol unit SoundOrion, with the then-upcoming album in which she was in postponed to be re-recorded without her. Narumi then retired from voice acting completely, with Yuika now being voiced by Shio Kisui.
• Elliot Gindi, the original English voice actor for Tighnari in Genshin Impact, came under fire in February 2023 when evidence was leaked revealing numerous cases of him sending sexually explicit and manipulative/threatening messages to underaged fans. miHoYo confirmed Gindi was fired from his role on February 13th, citing a breach of his contract, and with the version 3.6 update, Gindi's voice lines were rerecorded by Zachary Gordon. He also lost his roles as the Announcer and Hands in Brawl− for the same reason, with its 5.0.5 patch temporarily reverting to the original Brawl announcer, Pat Cashman.
• Much like many projects he was involved with, Gabriel Velez (aka Gamerduck) was fired from Billie Bust Up! after he was accused of raping his then girlfriend. Katie Nelson stated that he hadn't even recorded a single line prior to his firing.

Speedrunning and high scores

• In late January 2018, Todd Rogers, legendary for his 1982 5.51-second speedrun on the Atari 2600's Dragster, at the time the oldest standing video game record recorded by the agency Twin Galaxies, was banned from ever submitting scores again to their leaderboards. All of his records were wiped after his Dragster record was proven with computer analysis to be physically impossible, and shortly after Twin Galaxies learned he used a referee who was a personal friend of his to enter other impossible records onto the leaderboards for over 30 years. ^note His recorded score in the game Wabbit was 1,698, even though the game ends after hitting 1,300 and score increases by increments of 5. He submitted a score of 65 million in the Atari 5200 port of Centipede, with the second-place score being a mere 58,078. His record in Fathom was so outrageous that it was determined that Todd had to have played the game for 325 hours straight.
• MinecrAvenger was a popular and highly successful Minecraft speedrunner, starting in 2020 and maintaining several first-place records for various categories on Speedrun.com, but in December 2022, all of his records were completely scrubbed and he himself permanently banned from the site after it was discovered that all his runs were achieved through cheating. It took years for people to notice, but following several peer speedrunners noticing suspicious behavior in his runs regarding chest generation and the Ender Dragon (two key factors that are necessary to complete the speedrun but also extremely RNG-dependent), a large community investigation concluded that many of the conditions that won him his records were not merely improbable, but straight-up impossible in unmodified versions of Minecraft. With further investigations of his other runs also being riddled with traces of modification, he was erased from Speedrun.com, and MinecrAvenger would confess to modifying code to achieve his runs in early 2023.
• A few months after the Dragster fiasco went down, Billy Mitchell of The King of Kong fame had his records stricken from Twin Galaxies when it was determined that many of these records were achieved with modified hardware or using the MAME emulator, ^note This is a big deal because arcade game emulators may run at a slightly different speed than the original hardware, and Mitchell was also accused of abusing save states to get perfect runs including the Donkey Kong record shown in the film. The entire documentary was rendered an Unintentional Period Piece with his challenger, Steve Wiebe, officially recognized as the first player to score over a million points. Mitchell was also punished by the Guinness World Records, who stripped him of his entry for achieving the first-ever perfect score in Pac-Man in 1999. At first, he still had a few records, but in late 2020, Twin Galaxies' new owner Jace Hall sued him on the basis that all records he submitted were faked, completing his fall.
• Back in the mid-2000s, one of the most popular speedrunners was Mike "TSA" Damiani. He was most well known for his runs of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and how he dominated the leader boards for over half a decade. But in 2011, it was discovered that many of his runs were achieved through the use of splices.^note Splicing involves combining segments from different recorded playthroughs to make it look like a single complete run. This could allow runners to repeat segments until they get their desired time, then merge the playthroughs together. Spliced runs are not legitimate (a speedrun has to be one continuous session), and have never been accepted on leaderboards. During his runs, there are moments where the music blatantly jumps forward for no real reason. After these revelations, TSA had all of his runs removed from Speed Demos Archive and has officially been disowned by the The Legend of Zelda community.

Videogame journalists/personalities

• The extensive leak of Pokémon Sword and Shield two weeks before release (which caused the scrutiny that already surrounded the game's development to reach a fever pitch) was eventually traced to an employee for the Nintendo news site FNintendo who leaked the content from the review copies sent by Nintendo. Nintendo and The Pokémon Company International severed all ties with the website for breaching the non-disclosure agreement due to the reviewer's actions, while FNintendo themselves immediately fired the person responsible once they found out.
• Shortly after Metroid Dread released, Kotaku ran an article not only showcasing emulators' ability to run the game, but also encouraging readers to pirate it (and allegedly included direct links to the emulators in the article at one point). As a result, Nintendo blacklisted Kotaku from running advanced coverage of their games.
• Nintendo editor Filip Miucin lost his reviewing job at IGN after his first review for the site covering Dead Cells was discovered to be an almost word-for-word and beat-for-beat copy of another review by an independent YouTuber named Boomstick Gaming. This lead to further research showing Filip had plagiarized multiple of his past reviews before IGN, including some from IGN itself. IGN promptly fired him over this and had another reviewer create a review in its place. Filip would attempt to become a YouTuber after, but never gained prominence after due to his past plagiarism being so evident.

---