Editor-in-Chief at @Kotaku Author of Dead Game on Substack (on hiatus) Reach me with tips at: ethan.gach@kotaku.com / Signal: +12673263042
Philadelphia, PA
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Ninja will be like "streaming used to be entertaining but now it's dead" and meanwhile...
Kai Cenat’s setup for his Bloodborne stream marathon 😂 nitter.app/nbasanji/status/181950…
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You can see the exact moment Dr Disrespect appears to find out that Midnight Society is dropping him, or some other seemingly bad news related to his Twitch ban allegations.
He had just defeated Bayle The Dread and went to look at his phone after fast travelling to Scadu Atlus
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Spoke to the guy who nuked Phil Spencer in Fallout 76 last night. He said it wasn't personal, it's been his mission for weeks.
"He was the final boss in my eyes. In a RPG I prefer to be the bad guy."
kotaku.com/fallout-76-phil-s…
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Nintendo's crunch culture was literally called "Mario Time"
“B-b-but they made video games $80 :(“
Nintendo is one of the only game companies you don’t hear horror stories about the work environment from. You constantly see articles about how their staff receive annual pay increases. They don’t crunch. They don’t have mass layoffs.
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Reviewers: Erdtree will kick your ass
Miyazaki-san: Erdtree will kick your ass
Day-one players with hundreds of hours in the game: oh...oh shit...it's ACTUALLY kicking my ass
kotaku.com/elden-ring-shadow…
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Sponsored MindsEye streamer can't keep it together when telling viewers where they can buy the game.
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They were insane for this.
Other games would kill for this level of unhinged swag.
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I love that all of these Statler and Waldorf bits are based on Geoff's inner monologue reading people's mean tweets.
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Adam Sessler, former host of the G4 show X-Play, appears to have deleted his Twitter account after posting this
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MindsEye dev canceled Twitch streamer CohhCarnage's playthrough of the game seconds before it was supposed to start.
He said it was the first time that had ever happened in his streaming career.
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Whoa!
Bethesda Game Studios just became the first major "wall-to-wall" unionized studio in the country. 241 employees at the Fallout maker are part of the unit.
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Sam Lake tells investors that Remedy strives to make commercial successes but that games are also about creative expression and the company must never lose sight of that.
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Fascinating exchange about how Microsoft is reshaping Blizzard esports
NEW: I spoke to Blizzard's head of Overwatch esports about the company's new approach to competitive gaming and some positive early signs
But there are some topics (including Saudi Arabia's sudden esports omnipresence) he didn't want to touch
gamefile.news/p/overwatch-2-…
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BREAKING: Video game voice actors and motion capture performers voted overwhelming to authorize a strike.
They resume bargaining with Activision, EA, Warner Bros et al tomorrow, but could call a strike at any time now if negotiations don't progress.
SAG-AFTRA Members Approve Video Game Strike Authorization Vote With 98.32% Yes Vote sagaftra.org/sag-aftra-membe…
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Incredible how many good cartoons there used to be with collaborators creatively pushing the boundaries of whatever dumb license they were given, I guess because toy companies could afford to piss away tons of money on anything that would marginally increase sales
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EA's laying off 670 employees.
At the cost of $100,000 per person per year it could have kept each one on for five more years at the cost of last quarter's $325 million stock buyback.
EA laying off around 670 employees.
"We are also sunsetting games and moving away from development of future licensed IP that we do not believe will be successful in our changing industry.
This greater focus allows us to drive creativity, accelerate innovation, and double down on our biggest opportunities — including our owned IP, sports, and massive online communities."
gamesindustry.biz/ea-cutting…
ea.com/news/continuing-to-ev…
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BREAKING: Epic Games lays off roughly 50% of Bandcamp amidst its sale to Songtradr.
The Fortnite maker purchased the music platform just last year but is now spinning it off amid massive cost cutting.
We are ever humbled and thankful for your support. Solidarity forever ✊
ALT a green slide with the text: "Thank you for your support. Together we've collected over 10K signatures demanding Songtradr recognize Bandcamp United."
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"when the character is hidden behind the tree, the game forms a shadow, so you have a kind of sense for where the character is, even though you don't see the character clearly. Nintendo has a patent on that"
404media.co/cold-blooded-bus…
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Kotaku reached out to a bunch of gaming companies who jumped on the Black Lives Matter hashtag to offer support for specifics about what they're doing publicly and internally.
Nearly all of them declined to comment.
kotaku.com/game-companies-sa…
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Morale is the story is not "Nintendo bad" or "Mario Time was worth it" or "Mario Kart should't be $80" just that reality is more complicated than a fandom that reduces multinational companies to sports teams
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Astro Bot creative director Nicolas Doucet ends his GOTY acceptance speech by thanking Nintendo, though not by name.
It's the company's only real acknowledgement at the Game Awards tonight, and also one he seemingly isn't supposed to make directly as a Sony employee.
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Nintendo has revoked the Splatoon 3 2024 World Championship win after the team was exposed for making racist remarks
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What's shocking here isn't the lack of a good answer but the fact that Xbox didn't even seem to even bother prepping for the question
Xbox president Sarah Bond responds to a question from Bloomberg's @dinabass about why Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks was shut down. Full interview here: piped.video/watch?v=oIpc8VZ3…
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Sega of America workers just secured the first collective bargaining agreement of any major video game company in the U.S.
The contract includes raises, just cause protections, and several other concessions that can help push working conditions forward at other shops as well
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Sakurai blew $630K on an educational YouTube channel as a down payment on a "brighter future" for games. kotaku.com/smash-bros-sakura…
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NEW: Sources tell Kotaku a Nintendo of America contractor was fired shortly after asking a question about unions in a meeting.
Current and former employees speak up about working conditions and an exploitative contractor system. From @six6jiang and I:
kotaku.com/nintendo-america-…
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SGDQ crew broke out in dance during the Alan Wake 2 speedrun for Old Gods of Asgard twitch.tv/gamesdonequick/cli…
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So a quick recap:
*Sony removes almost all outside media access to its creatives
*Publishes a very rare interview with one of its star developers
*Said developer distances himself from it because it's full of fabricated quotes
*Sony nukes the entire interview and apologizes
Sony has removed the interview with Neil Druckmann: "we have found several significant errors and inaccuracies that don't represent his perspective and values (including topics such as animation, writing, technology, AI, and future projects)"
sony.com/en/SonyInfo/creativ…
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BREAKING: GameStop is killing Game Informer. All staff have been laid off.
The news comes the same week CEO Ryan Cohen is being sued for $47 million in insider trading.
kotaku.com/game-informer-gam…
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160 more Blizzard staff have unionized, this time across the Story and Franchise Development making it the "first in-house cinematic, animation, and narrative studio to form a union in the North American game industry."
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I can corroborate the part about toxic positivity. Some sources I've spoken with blamed a head in the sand mentality carried over from the studio's Bungie roots.
A sense the game would come together because the team was too good to fail. I'll have more next week.
I spoke extensively with someone who worked on Concord, and it's so much worse than you think.
It was internally referred to as "The Future of PlayStation" with Star Wars-like potential, and a dev culture of "toxic positivity" halted any negative feedback.
Making it cost $400m.
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GameStop is making people manually request refunds for the subscriptions they are no longer honoring:
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Bandcamp employees say they've been locked out of critical systems and unable to do their jobs since Epic announced it was selling.
This will hurt Bandcamp Fridays where 100% of the profits go to artists.
They're bargaining over layoffs and severance.
It's an epic mess.
We are so grateful to have a union.
ALT "Since we are a union, Epic Games management is legally required to provide information and sit down with us to negotiate. It’s the end of 2 long days of talking with Epic Games management. We have 2 more dates next week. Thanks for the solidarity and support." -- Bandcamp United
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‘Albion can’t be copyrighted’ - Peter Molyneux explains how his new game is set in the same world as Fable
vgc.news/news/albion-cant-be…
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Incredible how quickly Musk transformed Twitter from a very online public square to a nearly abandoned mall where the anchor stores have all gone out of business and the Auntie Anne's have all be replaced by smartphone cover kiosks and aggressive mid-level marketing schemes
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Microsoft spent five years buying up studios only to turn around and decide it doesn't have the bandwidth to run them all.
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Good Morning America gets confused and claims you can play Xbox console games on the ROG Xbox Ally.
Literally the most important thing to know is the one thing their report gets wrong.
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Yellow paint is lazy, ugly and completely shatters any sense of immersion.
And without it I wasted 5 minutes running around in circles:
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This is incredibly brazen stuff.
Making up fake AI authors. Claiming they are real. Then deleting them when asked and offering no formal comment, editorial note, or other response.
And not even a random SEO mill but under the Sports Illustrated name.
futurism.com/sports-illustra…
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Big time gaming leaker Pyoro has locked their account after leaking their source to a reporter
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Obsidian: Microsoft has never told us what to do.
*Moments later*
Microsoft rep: don't answer that question about Israeli apartheid
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Long audible sigh from my partner as I switched on Destiny and told her this was the conclusion of 10 years of my life while she walked up stairs to bed
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My boss explaining on a Zoom from their private jet why grandma needs to go into assisted living so I can complete my Excel files from the office
One of the wildest all-hands meetings I have ever seen. Clearview CEO celebrates a worker who said they sold their family dog after he said they needed to return to office, discusses whether it is 'fair' for a mother to keep a full time job
vice.com/en/article/wxj574/c…
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Seven of the 50 BioWare employees who were laid off in August are sueing the Dragon Age maker for better severance.
"We are struggling to understand why BioWare is shortchanging us in this challenging time."
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Masahiro Sakurai just pulled the YouTuber equivalent of a Christopher Nolan and revealed that all of his videos were actually recorded 2.5 years ago when he first started.
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2005.
I'm not judging and have no idea what the norms are now but fans love to squash nuance in order to push an agenda.
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Just incredibly grim.
One studio completely hallowed out chasing a live service trend and another gutted despite releasing one of 2023's best and most refreshing games.
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Humbles Games, which is owned by IGN, which recently purchased Gamer Network and laid of people at GamesIndustry.biz, VG247, and other sites, appears to have gutted its staff.
Well friends, me and the entirety of Humble Games was laid off this morning
If you need senior/lead QA at your game studio HI HELLO I DON'T HAVE A JOB ANYMOOOORE!
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News of FFXVI being a PS5 exclusive has reached the senate subscriber.politicopro.com/a…
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BBREAKING: Gaming gets its first union at Microsoft. 300 QA devs at Zenimax will have their union voluntarily recognized after the tech giant laid out its principles of labor organizing neutrality earlier this year.
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Game companies often confuse what's fun about playing a game with what's fun about watching an online personality play it and that, combined with wanting to keep creators with big audiences on your side, leads to a lot of overtuning and leaving more casual players behind.
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Sources: Gearbox is close to a sale. Embracer will unload the Borderlands maker in a deal to close next month.
It comes after a year of uncertainty for devs at the studio amid budget cuts, shelved projects and shakeups on the next Borderlands games
kotaku.com/borderlands-4-gea…
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BioWare tried to guilt trip laid off devs into not fighting for full severance, according to the lawyer representing the seven who are currently suing.
It was implied that the costs could further burden Dragon Age Dreadwolf's development.
kotaku.com/dragon-age-dreadw…
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This month marks the 10-year anniversary of Bethesda's blacklist of Kotaku, ostensibly over reporting that Fallout 4 would take place in Boston.
Since 2013, Bethesda hasn't sent review codes, press releases, or even acknowledged requests for comment. (1/3) 🧵
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Matt Booty last June: "[Arkane Austin staying open] is the plan right now. They are hard at work on updates and continued content for Redfall.”
Pete Hines in September: "We don't quit or abandon stuff just because it didn't start right."
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NEW: 300 QA across Bethesda/Zenimax studios voted "overwhelmingly" to unionize and Microsoft will voluntarily recognize the group, creating the biggest bargaining unit yet in the game's industry
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Embracer is shutting down @DSVolition. The 30-year old studio most recently put out the Saints Row reboot which is the PS Plus game for September.
The company used the Starfield embargo to try and bury the news.
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Funko popification of a once great sci-fi world
To whomever at Sony made this deal to get Ghostbusters into Destiny:
Don't stop.
I don't even play this game anymore, but I bought this stuff.
I will do this for all games you crossover with.
Have you heard of @helldivers2?
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Source just leaked March 2023's release calendar:
God of War Ragnarök - 3/10
Starfield - 3/10
Breath of the Wild 2 - 3/10
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Two things notable about this to me:
Nadella is jealous of Valve. Windows is what makes PC gaming possible but Steam collects all of the profit.
He's the one explaining Xbox's pivot in one of its biggest news weeks all year, not Phil Spencer.
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The Pokémon Company did almost nothing to promote today's livestream which ended up containing huge news. Some thought it might have even been cancelled or Japan-only.
A PR spokesperson now confirms it didn't hype the event out of respect for the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
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It looks like The Game Awards deleted an old tweet from last year's show that referenced the war in Ukraine (spotted by @Taleboules).
It's unclear when the post was removed.
2023's show was silent on the crisis in Gaza despite calls for a statement by Future Class members.
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Ubisoft VP of innovation a "bit frustrated" that players just don't get what's so great about reselling game NFTs finder.com.au/ubisoft-interv…
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However, it does appear he may have been transported to a police station for questioning. Unclear if by LAPD hired for the event, or a separate patrol vehicle.
The LAPD would only say there was "one radio call that was created" for the purposes of transporting him.
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SAG-AFTRA video game performers will be passing out leaflets about their negotiations with the big game companies at The Game Awards tomorrow
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It took just two months to go from Phil Spencer being "disturbed and deeply troubled" by a report about Bobby Kotick's Activision Blizzard to Microsoft's CEO praising Kotick's leadership and "commitment to real change." kotaku.com/head-of-microsoft…
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After a terrible 2022, Ubisoft's Yves Guillemot tells staff the next year is crucial, telling them in an email that "the ball is in your court" to deliver ontime/onbudget.
"Today more than ever, I need your full energy and commitment to ensure we get back on the path to success"
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Xbox's green initiatives have shaved 1.2 million metric tons off its annual CO2e emissions.
Unfortunately, it's overshadowed by rising emissions across the rest of the company due to Microsoft's AI initiatives.
At Microsoft, we’ve set ambitious commitments to meaningfully reduce our environmental impact, and Xbox plays an important part in achieving these goals. Here's an update on our carbon reduction and sustainability progress: news.xbox.com/en-us/2024/09/…
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"We found out later that Keighley had a party in another room with all the influencers and industry people. You know where Future Class met that day? At a Starbucks."
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I asked Saber for comment on if this is really Matt Karch's account or not since it reads like anti-woke crusader slop but haven't heard back yet.
The account was only created in May and the bio reads "generic male of sorts."
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GameSpot and Giant Bomb hit by layoffs shortly after being acquired by Fandom.
Fandom is owned by a private equity fund TPG whose CEO Jon Winkelried earned over $80 million last year.
kotaku.com/giant-bomb-gamesp…
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The game industry was not shy last year about condemning Russian's invasion of Ukraine but has been relatively silent about even acknowledging the mounting Palestinian death toll in Gaza, and in the case of the Golden Joysticks forbid mention of it.
nitter.app/thegameawards/status/1…
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NEW: Naughty Dog is laying off contract developers.
Sources tell Kotaku over 25 people have been cut early. No severance and they're being asked to keep it quiet.
kotaku.com/naughty-dog-ps5-p…
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One of the people laid off today at BioWare has been a writer on the Dragon Age games since Origins.
Just incredibly discouraging news out of that studio, and from a publisher that can afford not to treat people like excel spreadsheet formulas.
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My favorite bit of Shuhei Yoshida lore is when he was apparently "horrified" by how bad an early vertical slice of God of War 2018 was
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Nibel is an institution and I'll miss him around these parts.
He's exactly the type of account other social media platforms would normally try to compensate for the value they bring.
Weirdly, Twitter's plan is to start charging them!
kotaku.com/nibel-nibellion-t…
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Sony paid $3.5 million to make ARK: Survival Evolved a March PS Plus game.
Microsoft paid $2.5 million to keep it on Game Pass for the first half of this year, and $2.3 million to bring ARK 2 to the service when it launches.
Via September SEC filing.
sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…
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The fine is...$247 million.
That's less than .8% of the cost of all 747 Maxes that have been grounded on account of Boeing's malfeasance.
BREAKING: Boeing will plead guilty to a criminal fraud charge stemming from two deadly 737 Max crashes, Justice Department says apnews.com/article/boeing-gu…
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