Must not have been around for another EA title, gaming community was quite a ways smaller back five years ago- Mass Effect 3.

Ending leaked a year prior to launch, a rushed new ending was created where the choices you could make (3) resulted in the same ending in three different colours.

Reviewers revealed this prior to launch.

Sprinkle in a bit of EA accusing people who didn't like the game of sexism (I seem to recall they put some female games journalist from IGN into the game as a full character and received some very positive coverage from there which sparked complaints completely unrelated to the journalist in questions gender)

And having to play the tagged-on online mode to a singleplayer game to get the best ending in game through a special ingame currency that was seperate from the normal ingame currency.

At the time that tagged-on online thing was as bad as micro-transactions are seen today, it was pretty horrid, that said that game already had lootcrates and microtransactions, it was just on the EA-store itself (bioware points) rather than in-application.

Anyway yea, that one received mainstream coverage (as this did) and had gamers up in arms for weeks, I still reckon that's the greatest shitshow I ever saw in terms of launch controversies.

The outrage from it lasted for years after launch, the mainstream games news sites involvement in EAs damage control is what opened many peoples eyes to the corruption involved in that part of the medium and really made people switch over to youtube/twitch for gaming related news, killing many gaming related news sites, you might have noticed places like Defy media closing site after site these last three years.

So yea, I mean, Mass Effect 3 crippled traditional games media and was a controversy followed by many, many people, I'd still say that until this actually causes change to the industry it hasn't been as big of a shitshow.