With E3 2022 canceled, there’s a vacuum at the center of the video game marketing season. Many eyes are on Summer Game Fest for being both the lengthiest and the widest-ranging presser on the horizon. But the host, Geoff Keighley, recently saw fit to temper expectations ahead of the show, saying that it won’t be flush…
PlayStation Direct was recently (and inadvertently, it seems) updated with information on The Last of Us Part I, a remake of the original Naughty Dog adventure game “built from the ground up” for PlayStation 5 and releasing on September 2. It’s also coming to PC at a later date. Everything is gone now, but the…
Once upon a time, game demos were ubiquitous. Hell, for a blissful but fleeting moment in the early 2000s, even Nintendo got in the habit of regularly releasing GameCube preview discs. The discs, 3.1 inches in diameter, would make a handful of trials available for buzzy games. But like Heelys, low-rise jeans,…
It’s time to pay the piper. Dwarf Fortress, the extraordinary, free roguelike that has blossomed into a total fantasy life simulator, was an inspiration for monoliths like Minecraft and Rimworld. It’s twenty years old this year, and due to come to Steam sometime soon. However, right now, its two-person development…
Microsoft laid out some of its big plans for gaming ahead of Sunday’s Xbox and Bethesda showcase, and those plans include a steady stream of more big exclusives, expanded Game Pass perks, and bringing video game cloud streaming directly to smart TVs. Most of the plans are forward-looking, but Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil…
Back in September 2021, The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment in Oakland, California, better known as The MADE, began tweeting about how impossibly difficult it seemed to fund a video game museum.
At first glance, the Genshin Impact community seems positively obsessed with hitting the biggest possible numbers with the characters they’ve rolled from the gacha. Content creators on YouTube and TikTok regularly showcase damage totals of six or even seven figures. Online discussions are dominated by math nerds who…
Alex Kipman, a longtime Microsoft executive, is leaving the company after 21 years due to numerous misconduct allegations, Insider reports. The accusations include inappropriately touching female employees and watching what one witness described as “VR porn” at work.
Netflix just dropped the first trailer for its anime series based on Cyberpunk 2077. Whatever complaints you might have about the game, you may want to leave those at the door.
The last we saw of Intellivision’s Amico console, it was trying to sell some NFTs and was being described as a “car crash” of a device. If you thought that meant things couldn’t get any worse for the beleaguered device, you have not been paying attention to its development.
Today, Anime Expo, the “largest celebration of Japanese pop culture in North America” announced an update to its covid health and safety protocols that disappointed many voice actors, cosplayers, and artists alike.
Nintendo opened pre-orders for the Xenoblade Chronicles 3 special edition bundle four hours ago. But since then, the online store’s been unstable as folks rush to drop money on the collector’s item.
After five years away, Call of Duty will be coming back to digital storefront Steam with the upcoming release of Modern Warfare 2, the latest in the super-popular shooter franchise. However, be prepared to spend a bit more this year, as MW2 on PC will now cost $70.
If Steam’s huge list of sex games is a gated, glistening community pool, I am the discarded, embarrassing flamingo float, doomed to skim the surface for all eternity. I make attempts to dive in—I look at each 2D succubus thumbnail carefully and determine whether or not demon porn is against my core values. I carefully…
For the first time in more than a decade, Mario returns to the pitch. Mario Strikers: Battle League, a revival of Nintendo’s long-dormant soccer series, hits the Nintendo Switch on Friday. Nintendo did not provide Kotaku with an early copy of the game for reviews. We’re experiencing it, and its press cycle, alongside…
An independent journalist has drawn the attention of Hideo Kojima’s development studio, Kojima Productions, after publishing a story revealing supposed details about the Metal Gear creator’s next game. The game, which the journalist claimed is a horror title, is apparently dubbed Overdose and stars actress Margaret…
With Elden Ring over three months removed from its February launch, players are now looking for more challenging ways to experience the massive FromSoftware game. Enter a mod that introduces hunger and thirst mechanics, a whole host of region-specific diseases, and nights so dark that you need a torch to see more than…
If there’s a cat in your house, how does it typically walk around? With its tail pointed straight up, probably—y’know, like any normal cat. But the feline protagonist of Stray is a bit more modest: He primarily keeps his tail down, at least based on gameplay footage viewed during a hands-off streamed preview event…
In this week’s annual DC Pride 2022 #1 comic anthology, Kevin Conroy, the legendary Batman voice actor who rose to prominence in the fan-beloved Batman: The Animated Series, has written a powerful short comic about how his journey coming out as a gay man helped him find his voice as the caped crusader.
“No one wanted to be on that project because it ate people. It destroyed people,” one former developer on Fallout 76 told Kotaku. “The amount of people who would go to that project, and then they would quit [Bethesda] was quite high.”
Last week Blizzard launched Diablo Immortal, the next entry in its long-running, loot-driven action-RPG franchise. However, unlike previous games, this one is free-to-play, and was built from the ground up to be a mobile game first. While it did also come out on PC last week, the reality is this is a very different…
The Electronic Entertainment Expo used to be the cornerstone of the video game industry, the week that every publisher, developer and fan had circled in their calendars because it was where the biggest news, reveals and interviews of the year could be had.
Halo Infinite will finally get some form of co-op for its campaign, 343 Industries announced today. It’ll be playable as one of those basically-just-a-beta “technical flights,” the same method the studio used last summer to get players into the first-person shooter’s initial multiplayer testing.
Hey, it’s 2022 and not the mid-90s right? I only ask because I’m not sure which of us otaku worked some magic–possibly making a wish to Shenron, or sacrificing a loved one with a behelit–so that we might live in a time where hiatus purgatory bunk buddies Hunter x Hunter and Berserk both announce an end to their…
Today, both Giant Bomb staff and co-founder Jeff Gerstmann talked about his departure from the site he helped create 14 years ago. While he didn’t appear on the latest podcast from Giant Bomb to say goodbye, Gerstmann launched his own Patreon-supported video game podcast and video project. He explained that he still…
For some, it’s a vision of utopia. For a thousand more, it’s unmistakably a dystopia. But it’s really just a speculative LinkedIn post about the potential future of “blockchain” gaming, which has gone viral across multiple social media platforms when folks started mocking what they see as its offensively absurd…
The last time we heard about Abandoned, the PS5 exclusive that’s still shrouded in mystery, developer Blue Box Game Studios swore it wasn’t canceled despite reports suggesting otherwise. Well, it seems we’re back to questioning the game’s existence again after a GameSpot report alleged Abandoned’s development is in…
I’m not surprised that Fortnite crypto exists. Whether it’s Nintendo or Minecraft NFTs, crypto scammers love to make environment-destroying projects out of other people’s IPs. What’s surprising is that Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney bothered to give the Fortnite Tokens project his time of day. “This is a scam,” he tweeted…
It should come as no surprise at this point that Kotaku is a pro-One Piece website on account of the manga being a crazy good read for nearly 25 years and by virtue of it being the only series to have Nico Robin in it. While some folks have yet to finally raise their anchors and venture into the manga’s 1051 chapters…
Does the saying “better late than never” apply to live service games? Today, developer DICE unveiled “Zero Hour,” the delayed first season of Battlefield 2042, its troubled futuristic military shooter. It’s available on Thursday, June 9. Here’s a trailer:
E3? More like E0! That’s the sort of total groaner you could expect to hear at an E3 press conference—y’know, if the games industry’s historically biggest marketing event was actually happening in 2022.
The GameStop in the Gateway Mall in Lincoln, Nebraska is one of the busiest around, at least according to the person who used to run it. But over the weekend it was closed after four employees decided to walk out and never return over what he says are bad working conditions and a verbally abusive district manager.…
After the tragic and sudden passing of Berserk creator Kentaro Miura last year at the age of 54, fans had been wondering whether the series would, or even could, continue without him. After over a year of waiting, they now have their answer.
The brilliant French artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud had one of the most recognisable art styles around. His works have inspired video games for decades—including the ones he worked on directly—but few have been able to truly look like one of his illustrations come to life.
Back in February, Gary Bowser—who in most media reports has been described as a ‘hacker’—was sentenced to 40 months in prison for his role in selling cheat and modification devices for Nintendo hardware. Being a court case, most of the reporting dealt only with names on a page and cold facts, but a transcript of…
During a recent interview with Gamer, a prominent Japanese gaming website, Final Fantasy XIV producer Naoki Yoshida let slip that his team was at one point mulling the possibility of adding a competitive battle royale to the online role-playing game. It sounds like it’d be a whole lot of fun, too.
Last October, after a surprising amount of hype, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl debuted on all major platforms. While the game was well-received, one big complaint arose from the lack of voiced characters, making the whole thing feel a bit quiet and dead, especially compared to its competition. But now, a new update out…
