Some personal news! I've resigned from Kotaku and Jim Spanfeller is an herb
— Jen Glennon (@hellojenglen) March 21, 2024
This is, apparently, in response to pressure from the owners to put less emphasis on articles and more emphasis on creating game guides. (Jim Spanfeller is CEO of G/O Media, owner of Kotaku.)
Kotaku Senior Reporter Ethan Gach wrote for us, way back when.
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The main thing that I’ll say about Kotaku is that, in recent years, I hadn’t seen anything of theirs shared because it sparked joy. There was a bunch of outrage posts of screenshots (because to give them a click would be to be rewarding them) and a bunch of outrage posts of this or that take that they had on games or whatever they were writing about that wasn’t a game… but I didn’t get any “hey, I know that this is Kotaku, but you should really read this” stuff that made it over to me.
The rumor is that Management said that Kotaku needs to create 50 game guides a week.
Right there, I want to say that that’s BS. I have been playing Nobody Saves the World all week (and it’s really good!) and I’ve just reached the point where they reveal part of the backstory of Nobody and I got the hat that lets me upgrade my transforms even more and I’ve unlocked a total of 12 of them and I don’t think that I’d be able to make a guide for this game. Not even close!
If they only mean stuff like “10 of the Best Combos in Nobody Saves the World (and you’ll never guess number six!)”, that *MIGHT* be doable… I could probably throw something together like that… but I’d say that anybody just playing through the game like normal and able to get to the point where they get the hat will discover 8 or 9 of the really good combos that I’d come up with. Like, on their own.
I can appreciate that management might quote Michael Jordan and say “Republicans buy sneakers too” as part of a new direction for the site… but 50 guides a week? I can’t imagine needing more than 5 guides a week.
So this is probably management saying “if they quit, we don’t have to pay severance”.
Which, no matter how you feel about Kotaku, sucks for the writers who are still there.Report
Can’t get worked up about it because that site has gone downhill for years, as all Gawker/former Gawker sites have. Seems like there’s a lot fewer substantive reviews, and a lot more outragey click bait about whatever the lefty cause du jour is. I don’t even check the feed frequently any more, because I know there’s so little of interest to me there.
There’s no way they mean 50 substantive, comprehensive game guides a week. That’s impossible.Report
I haven’t been a regular visitor of Kotaku since Obama’s first term and the last time I went there specifically to read an entire article, it was one written by Brother Ethan himself. It was this one, an article talking about the fact that the racism of the era from which Cuphead’s art style was lifted was not addressed by the game.
Went years after that before I wandered back for research purposes when I was writing about the Hogwart’s Legacy game. I wanted to see what Kotaku had written about it. At the time, I wrote this. Since then, there have been a number of articles written about the game but the overwhelming majority seem to be taking a clear editorial stance. Granted, my final review of the game was that, as a game, it wasn’t particularly good or bad, mostly “meh”… but as a Wizarding World Experience, it was a love letter to people who wanted a game where they could go to Hogwarts.
The editorial stance of the site seemed to be that they did not expect that they’d have any readers who would want such a love letter.
And since then, I haven’t had a reason to go back until this very comment right here.
They sold their birthright for a mess of pottage.
There’s no way they mean 50 substantive, comprehensive game guides a week. That’s impossible.
It *MIGHT* be possible if they plagiarized the game guides from GameFAQs.Report
If you go to Kotaku.com (yes, I know, but we have to make sacrifices for science) and click on Guides, you get a bunch of short articles explaining some aspect of a game, like “18 Things to Know Before Starting Dragon’s Dogma 2,” “FF7 Rebirth’s New Patch: Your Guide To The New Features,” “What You Need To Know About Stardew Valley’s Green Rain.”
So these aren’t like the complete catalogs of everything there is to know about a game that you find on GameFaqs.com, but brief “tips and tricks” articles giving you information about some aspect of a game. This seems doable, but would leave Kotaku’s writers less time to crap out poorly-reasoned political screeds.
Also, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is out! I don’t think it’s ever been mentioned here, but Dragon’s Dogma was a great game. I think it might be the only game that I’ve ever finished and then immediately replayed again.Report
I think the Real story behind Jenn Glennon-Ex Wokie boss of Kotaku ended up quitting is that she probably realized that she and her brainless cohorts weren’t gonna get away with pulling the dumb crap that they were pulling, which consisted of Shady deals, lying in their gaming articles, which had no fact checking at all to back up there Shit, also backstabbing and insulting gaming devs & gamers for not going along with the Woke/laughable narrativeReport