By Nelson Schneider - 11/16/24 at 02:58 PM CT
Kotaku used to be the definitive place for Games Journalism in the 20- ‘00s. Every game, every discussion, every gaming tangential subject – you name it, if you Google’d it, all roads lead to Kotaku, and they were – with heavy emphasis on the past tense part of the statement – a comprehensive and good place to read about videogames. Kotaku’s ability, as a digital-only platform, to react to rapidly emerging and changing environment of the Games Industry effectively dealt the death blow to print gaming magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly. But as we’ve been seeing in the Post-Dot-Com-Bubble era, tech monopolies are fertile fields for corruption and decadence.
In the last decade, Kotaku has gone from the de-facto source for information about videogames to a punchline after many years of creeping activism that saw the site’s focus shift dramatically from covering every tidbit of gaming news before any other outlet could produce an article about it, to berating and scolding its target audience. Instead of publishing articles about niche games, Kotaku replaced those with articles about niche political perspectives.
There was push back (look up “GamerGate”), and, as a result, the gaming hobby that used to be united became polarized like everything else (thanks, Kotaku). Being run by people who weren’t part of the target audience fomented an Us vs. Them mentality, where Gamers and Games Journalists became bitter enemies in a completely unnecessary civil war, which only served to drive each side further and further to the extremes. I firmly believe we wouldn’t have Souls Trolls gatekeeping gaming culture if it weren’t for activist-journalism outfits like Kotaku.
Unfortunately, Kotaku has never really learned its lesson, and after going through a meatgrinder of sales and acquisitions through a struggling world of unprofitable online journalism outlets, ultimately ended up as part of a conglomerate known as the G/O Media Group in 2019. Since then the owners have tried to stifle the flow of irrelevant and toxic content flowing from the site, with a new mandate, as of 2023, to focus on creating videogame guides instead of op-eds or news coverage. As a result of G/O’s attempt at managing this unruly pool of Millennial and Zoomer Neo-Marxists, Kotaku has hemorrhaged leadership, going through three Chief Editors in the course of two years, and most recently seeing the departure of yet another toxic Senior Editor who allegedly decided to leave the platform before its most recent wave of layoffs.
As it stands right now, Kotaku is the last They/Them standing among its sibling sites. Kotaku UK was shut down in 2020, while Kotaku Australia was shut down last month. After G/O’s last round of cuts this week, the site is down to a reported 6 employees… which is still double what MeltedJoystick has, but, hey, at least we LIKE videogames.
Could 2024 be Kotaku’s final year, after all these years of Gamers wishing the site would just go away and leave us alone? What kind of market for videogame guides from a dedicated third-party publisher is there, really, when fan communities tend to generate their own guides as labors of love? If G/O Media completely gutted Kotaku and started from scratch again with an entirely new staff of vetted and genuine lovers of videogaming, would it even be possible to shake off the site’s reputation as the home of cultural vandalism and Marxist activism?
