# gorilla tag, how it fundamentally fights its own design principles, and why it has deteriorated, alongside another axiom's disregard for their community as they rake in millions
This game upsets me now and I just have to write endlessly about why it's gotten as bad as it has, as opposed to 2021.

## piles of feature creep
Lemming originally made Gorilla Tag with simplicity in mind -- something the modern version of the game actively tries to fight in order to add more content than the game warrants.

The game was intended to be immersive, focused, and simplistic in such a way that it can't hold what Another Axiom tries to force it to be.

Have you ever noticed how terrible the layout of Stump is now? Or why gamemodes just disappear sometimes whenever they decide the next new thing should replace them?

This is due in part to just how much feature creep and technical debt Another Axiom has plummeted the game into. Each update, the game code gets even more janky and hard to untangle, all while they have to destroy parts of the game just to fit all the new crap they add in.

The game is called Gorilla **Tag** -- do we really need a pet-catching simulator, hoverboards, insanely unbalanced horror modes with enemies that 1-tap you, gamemodes that make zero sense and aren't fun, all of which have no replayability value past the first 10 minutes? Make a game about tag! You made a game about tag! It was done!

> Oh, but with no content updates, the game will get boring!

This is a dumb excuse. People still play the old DOOMs, Quake III Arena, Super Mario 64, Old School RuneScape. I can go on about all kinds of old games from the 90's/00's/early 2010's that people still play because **concepts and games don't magically depreciate themselves over time** unless you ruin them with unneeded feature creep and content bloat. Also, games don't need to be fun until the end of time. Even Lemming recognised this about their game when it was indie.

Can you imagine if, like, I don't know, Mario 64 was still getting content updates after 10 years? It would be filled with content nobody cares about and distract from the core point of the game.

This kind of live-service behaviour is one of the big reasons the gaming industry has been deteriorating for years and years.

## who needs an art-style!?
As it turns out, when you bring a ton of people on and manufacture content en masse, it tends to deteriorate all consistency.

When Lemming was the sole creative vision behind all of Gorilla Tag (with a few specific people helping on specific things, like backend programming (NtsFranz) and music (Stunshine)), both gameplay and the modelling felt consistent. It felt more like a whole game.

Nowadays, they have so many artists that all make things in their own art styles, and that mixed with all of the gameplay also feeling inconsistent, it almost feels like the game is in an identity crisis and has no idea what it actually wants to be.

This also applies to the music too. Gorilla Tag used to have one composer who made a song or two when an update justified one. One person driving the musical talent behind the game made it feel more consistent over time and feel like it belonged. Compare to how, i.e., Lena Raine's work clashes with C418's work in the modern version of Minecraft. Lena Raine is not a bad composer, not at all; they are a **fantastic** composer and I love their work in Celeste -- but when it's mixed with other music that doesn't feel the same, it can be very jarring and makes the soundtrack (and to an extent, the whole game that holds it) not feel like a contiguous whole.

## cash cow till the end
Oh fucking boy. The cosmetic prices.

Not a **single** person in their right mind can say 100 SR daily is even **remotely** enough for how many paid cosmetics they add every 2 weeks. Most of the cosmetics are at least 3000-4000 SR, and they add at least 5-8 of those *each update*.

Back in the day, cosmetics were 5000 SR for a pack of 3 or 4 cosmetics, and you usually had at least a few months to save up. Now they have about 6 of those bi-weekly, they only give you one cosmetic, and you basically have to pay money to get them because they rotate far too quickly.

Not to mention the bundles -- $30 USD for 10000 SR and a few cosmetics? That amount of SR can barely get you like 3 cosmetics now.

This became especially brazen when they had a $45 USD bundle that gave you 1000 SR and 2 cosmetics. What the hell? What? That amount of money alone can get you like 10050 SR, and you're giving people 1000 SR and 2 cosmetics that are already extremely aesthetically similar to the Paintbrawl set you had released years ago? This is just outright greedy.

Also, now there are just downright mobile game monetisation tactics in the game. Ghost Reactor and Super Infection both have ways to spend money to skip grinds or time waits, both of which are things mobile asset-flip Unity games regularly do to convince people to shell out to keep playing or be more powerful. It's bordering on being downright pay-to-win. It sucks.

---

On 2026-02-02, Lemming announced a subscription-based plan to get extra features for $10/mo. Let's break down the features, shall we?

The main 2 things you get, other than a room in City, a cosmetic, and a coloured name, are the ability to beta test new features and create 20-player rooms.

First of all, beta testing new features is something people typically get **paid** to do, not pay the company for the privilege of doing so!

Second of all, paying money to create rooms with more players...?\
This doesn't cost anything for Another Axiom. Photon Premium Cloud bills per CCU, a.k.a. per individual person online on the **whole game**. It doesn't matter how you slice the rooms; you're paying a flat rate per person online, period. They turn around and say, "Oh, it uses more bandwidth" -- but Premium Cloud includes 6 TB baseline. RPCs and RaiseEvents are tiny. I've measured it, and an hour or so of gameplay only uses a megabyte and a half or so. It's only $50/TB too, so I can't imagine 20-player rooms creating any measurable difference.

---

Let's do some back-of-the-napkin maths, shall we?

$0.29 / CCU / month\
4 years = 48 months\
0.29 × 48 = $13.92\
$15 - $13.92 = $1.08 left over

A single $15 purchase pays for an entire 4 years of a player's incurring costs on Photon. I've also run some loose head statistics, and players only last for about a year and a half -- you're lucky to see a player with a creation date over 2 years ago.

Let's say they charged $20 up-front on all platforms (which it does on Steam and Meta Horizon Link). Let's also say it has no microtransactions. As mentioned above, a $15 purchase pays for 4 years of Photon Realtime -- now that we're paying $20, let's play it safe and cut that year figure in half to roughly cover their AWS backend, Photon Voice, Cloudflare, among other smaller things they likely pay for.

That $20 purchase one time pays for the **average player's entire lifetime in the game**.

They make enough money already.

Let's now say, instead of putting ALL development time into Gorilla Tag, we take concepts like Monke Blocks, Ghost Reactor, Critters, etc., that are out of place in GT and break them off into different game projects and flesh them out enough to be their own game on their own volition. Now that game can be sold for $15-$20 on its own, and a lot of the time, to the same people that already bought into the other game.

Now we have multiple different games, with multiple different gameplay styles, that have their own footing, all of them being sold individually and holding their legs up on their own. This works for indie studios like Landfall, and it's what AAA game devs did before they milked the same games dry until they couldn't anymore. There's no reason Another Axiom can't do this, and it would be better for the players in almost every way, but no -- it's not as profitable. So now, we all get the shit end of the stick, and Another Axiom gets the money. No one benefits but them.

## its rough around the edges, because we cut corners
This game runs like trash and is so buggy.

Loading in Caves takes like 20 whole seconds because their scene loader just doesn't work well. Other maps loaded instantly in 2021.

The cosmetics take like 3 entire minutes to load whenever the game opens because they rewrote their cosmetic handling and it's just that inefficient. Cosmetics loaded after a few seconds in 2022-2024.

Cutting corners and building things quickly makes lots of bugs and lots of performance problems. This is why stuff like Electron is so prevalent in the computer world now. It's nice to do things the easy and cheap way, but it deteriorates the user experience so much when the end product runs poorly and works so jankily.

They are planning to do a beta soon, but that's only half the story. Running a beta means nothing if you do not actually collect feedback and fix those problems and design flaws, which Another Axiom has a bad track record of not doing.

## ignoring the community
Another Axiom is really bad about just not listening to people.

GizmoGoat (a well-known and respected modder within the Gorilla Tag space) told Another Axiom about a bug with a 2-letter fix in their map loader build scripts that broke map builds on all platforms but Windows on 2024-10-04, and it took over 8 months to fix and maybe [still haven't fixed it as of 2025-08-23](https://www.reddit.com/r/GorillaTag/comments/1mwkfs3/uhh_why_is_this_being_said_each_time_i_try_to/).

On 2025-09-12, an AA employee [finally got back to them about the issue 11 months later](https://github.com/Another-Axiom/GT_CustomMapExample/issues/3#issuecomment-3285602379)... just to say that they don't have Windows Build Support installed, after multiple people in the thread shared that they also cannot build maps because of the same bug. They also provided their runtime patch in which the read-me fully explains the problem, the solution, and the code used to patch it with Harmony. Multiple people in the thread have explained the problem, and AA claims it's user error without at all addressing what anybody has said about the problem. GrossAcid also told them in the past that they reported this problem directly to the developers.

Some code in the assembly seems to imply it's fixed, but still -- the lack of communication with the community, to the point that a problem reported almost on release day took nearly a year to be at all recognised by Another Axiom, displays a pretty large disregard for their community and should be pointed out.

This also brings into question how or if communication happens between the developers inside Another Axiom, too. If it took a year to get a response where the developer states that it is an issue that is unrelated to the real issue and has already been silently fixed, what does that say about how teamwork is done inside the company? Shouldn't this have been discussed internally and this problem already marked as solved on, i.e., an internal Trello board?

When GizmoGoat also spoke about major game-breaking bugs in the Discord server, they were told by Cody O'Quinn, "you have no idea how this works", among other extremely harsh messages like that.

You cannot, as a **sound designer**, tell a programmer who has worked with the game code for 4 years of their life that they do not know how the code works. This is ridiculous.

This is absolutely and inexcusably incompetent behaviour from those who pride themselves on being one of the best dev studios in the VR space.

They also muddied the waters so hard about modding, being extremely vague about everything to the point nobody really knows what is allowed or not. Trying to fit ALL mods into a 0 or 1, a binary "yes or no" that X or Y is cheating, is extremely short-sighted and sidesteps the fact that these things have nuance.

They also have their own..... unpaid exploit testers that they do not listen to. GT Security told the devs about how many exploits the hand-holding update would have, and they just did not listen. Hey, that update came out with crash exploits on day 1! It's a real shame nobody told them this would happen.

Make a damn bug bounty!

---
David Yee was also seen in an [interview](https://youtu.be/q1BvJh0w0ig) explaining how they were listening to the community and developing their game with the community.

Motherfucker. Your last beta was 2-3 years ago at the time you said this. You do not have the right to say you are "developing with the community". You worked at EA for 10+ years and were in a high-up position. You are designed to siphon money from people as efficiently as possible while deflecting all complaints. Fuck the hell off with this "We listen to our community!" bullshit. I am so deeply tired of hearing companies soft-speak their community and pretend like they don't use them like a money fleshlight and fuck them for years.

## genuinely just straight incompetence
One time (I don't remember exactly when, but it did happen) the devs left a working test nonce in their source code that let you log in as anybody and use their account for whatever you pleased. That's a ridiculous mistake to make. Not including sensitive authentication info in your source is beginner stuff. Use a fucking environment variable or a gitignored `.var` file.

They also left a password in their source code once:\
`mONKE1234`\
What the hell? You might as well have used goddamn `hunter2` at this point.

The aforementioned password ended up being the password for **one of Another Axiom's Unity accounts.** This is... just insane incompetence. A child could pick a better password than this.

## banning community members for no reason
On Oct. 2nd, 2025, an unnamed community member was device banned completely from both Orion Drift and Gorilla Tag. They were a community member who actively reported exploits for **9 months straight**, put hundreds of dollars into Orion Drift, was part of the closed beta, was the first event staff member, knew most of the developers, and had ban permissions for some time.

This is absolutely unacceptable. Banning someone who contributed both money, time, and important exploit details for no reason is insane.

Put this into perspective:\
They have an account worth probably **over 400 USD** and consistently helped Another Axiom with exploits over the course of half a year.

Another Axiom repaid this by banning them for 100 years.

Keep in mind, this **cannot be an accident**. Such a device ban, as of writing, requires manual work in Mothership to get the device certificate and put it into a "banned" list. They knew who they were and intentionally banned them in particular.

So, why were they banned?\
They unlocked a paddle cosmetic that did nothing at the time with an unprotected API endpoint and immediately reported it without doing as much as showing it off. Multiple other community members, both in and out of ComSec, owned this cosmetic and even showed it off themselves with no repercussions. The cosmetic came out 1 day after their ban.

Electronic cites that "this can affect our ability to make money from the game and destabilise our marketplace in-game."
It's all about money! They don't care about anything else.
By the way, this cosmetic was free when it came out. AA is just spouting bullshit.

I am running out of words to describe how insane this is.

They were only later unbanned because almost all of ComSec was yelling at AA about this situation. AA doesn't care about you until you become a threat to them, just like any other company. You see YouTubers having problems with our terrible and hyper-abused copyright systems, or random videos being taken down for no reason, and they try to appeal, just for nothing to come out of it. Their only path forward at that point is turning to social media and publicly raising a fight about the situation until it becomes a threat to Google's profits. The same principle is true of Another Axiom.

On another incident, both GizmoGoat and Dev9998 (2 well-known and respected modders) were banned from GTMG (Gorilla Tag Modding Group) simply because Will joined their room one day. This ban was going to be permanent but was reduced down to, I think, 1 month for GizmoGoat and 2 months for Dev.
They only banned them after Will joined them in that lobby. Other people were there as well, but they were not banned because they aren't as well known in the community. I think they just want excuses to ban community members for fun, because there's no sane reason to be so quick to ban known members while doing nothing to randoms.

## closing thoughts
All of this combines into a truly unfun game and community. The game feels like it has no idea what it wants to be, runs terribly, and all the new content barely functions, if at all, and it's not fun, putting minimal effort into making sure the content works at all, all while ignoring everyone's problems and putting hundreds of dollars' worth of IAPs out every 2 weeks and acting like they're the best ever.

They know their target audience either does not care about these things or is too young to recognise that fact. They also know their target audience is too young to understand just how much they are spending on SR. Another Axiom may not realise it, but virtual currency systems mess with your psychology in ways that make you not realise how much money you're spending.

This game was fine in 2021. It had a good amount of content, did what the game was intended to do, and the IAPs were reasonably priced to keep the servers afloat. It is deeply saddening how poorly designed and programmed this game is now. It's so easy and cheap to rush out content without testing and without making sure it works, so that's what they do. Less money spent on development time + making as much money off your players as possible whilst ignoring them = big bucks.

Do not give Another Axiom your money. Whatever you do, DO NOT be a [whale](https://www.gameslearningsociety.org/what-is-a-whale-in-gaming/). If you act like a whale, you WILL spend hundreds of dollars on in-game items that **do nothing** and you **will eventually lose them**. This gaming model is only profitable because whales spend ludicrous amounts of money on IAPs, not realising that companies are exploiting their psychology to come out the other end with millions.

If anyone from Another Axiom ends up reading this: **do better.** But I know you won't because you're like every other AAA game studio nowadays and are only in it to make money and don't give one fuck about the players or the game, lmao.

I'm quitting modding and playing Gorilla Tag for all of these reasons (like GizmoGoat), but for my own mental health too. The community and developers really get to you after a while, and it got to the point that participating in the GT(MG) community began degrading my sympathy for others. Towards the very end, I noticed myself being much happier and less of a hateful person whenever I was in other communities. This place's culture is just that bad. I've met a few good friends through it all, but they are a golden needle in a haystack of self-centred tweens who only want things for themselves and refuse to parse anything that doesn't align with their exact views about a damn video game. It truly is an awful place to ingrain yourself, and I highly recommend anyone who is reading this consider leaving sooner rather than later.

I will end this document with a fucking bombshell of a quote.
> You can put a 5-year-old in the headset. In fact, you know, I've seen really, you know, family members put their kids in the headset and they walk up to a wall and the right thing happens, which is they connect with the world. - David Neubelt of Another Axiom in [this talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0YIoyr-oY0&t=307s)

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TL;DR: Capitalism ruins everything fun.