Kotaku
The messy aftermath of Reddit’s controversial API price increase might get messier. The ransomware hacker group BlackCat, which claimed responsibility for snatching 80GB of company data in February, is now demanding the news aggregator and community platform fork over $4.5 million and rescind its latest policy…
Kotaku
Valve—the company behind Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and digital game store juggernaut Steam—has revealed its future plans for its popular free-to-play MOBA, Dota 2. And those plans, surprisingly, don’t involve players buying annual paid battle passes that require grinding to unlock cosmetics and other new content.…
Kotaku
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is Nintendo’s most expensive game, the first the developer debuted at the (unfortunately) new industry standard price of $70. Now, though, a baked-in Amazon discount lets you buy the game for $60, or the price nearly all Nintendo games retain even several years after their…
Kotaku
Developer CD Projekt Red is still tinkering with Cyberpunk 2077 ahead of DLC Phantom Liberty’s September release. Case in point: The studio dropped a new patch for the open-world sci-fi RPG on June 20, detailing fixes for a number of bugs, including a few that seem to have been around since day one.
Kotaku
Kotaku
Every time I hop into a lobby in Street Fighter 6, it feels like I’m one of the only people who has an avatar that looks just like a regular guy. This game’s character creator is wild, folks. You can create near-perfect recreations of just about anyone, or you can make some weird little guy, and if I’ve learned…
Kotaku
Square Enix’s once-abandoned Chocobo racing game, a Final Fantasy spin-off titled Chocobo GP, has received a second chance at life without all the bad microtransactions, which previously ended up nickle-and-diming players for game features.
Kotaku
Final Fantasy XIV is out on June 22, but you can play the opening prologue for free right now on PlayStation 5. You should. It’s incredible and the only thing I’ve wanted to play since I finished it last week.
Kotaku
Xbox announced a new wave of subscription service Game Pass titles in a June 20 blog post, and it looks like late June and early July will be stocked with hidden gems.
Kotaku
My fellow slackers, bohemians, and those who’ve made a point of getting through difficult challenges in life by exerting the least amount of effort, I bring you a success story. Recently, a streamer has climbed to the top of Fortnite’s competitive ranks by camping in the bushes and hugging the circle to victory.
Kotaku
Kaitlyn Siragusa—you’ll recognize her as variety streamer Amouranth—is leaving behind 6.4 million Twitch followers behind to stake a new claim on livestreaming platform Kick. Like other streamers fed up with poorly communicated changes around stringent monetization rules and an uncomfortable, confusing 50/50 revenue…
Kotaku
Not one to be left out of the Big Summer Video Game Revealapalooza, Nintendo has announced it’s holding a Direct presentation this week, and it will feature Switch games coming out in the second half of 2023.
Kotaku
Five people are currently missing after a tourist sub called the Titan tried searching for remains of the HMS Titanic. We don’t yet know why contact was lost, but the emergency search now underway has people pouring over every detail of the OceanGate Expeditions voyage and how the sub for it was built, including the…
Kotaku
If there’s a big enough data set to pull from, AI can create audio and visual replications of anyone suddenly saying and doing things they’ve never said before. You’ve probably already seen this in action, whether it’s those popular AI TikTok songs that show you what Ariana Grande might sound like singing a Taylor…
Kotaku
I played the original farming sim Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life on my GameCube religiously as an 11-year-old. I don’t know why I was so drawn to it as a kid. I had no interest in farming in real life, but somehow was transfixed by it in a video game. I married the girl next door Celia, and we raised a son and grew…
Kotaku
Ruth Bosch is an artist who has worked for companies like League of Geeks and creative studio Volta, and who is now art director at Studio Fizbin, developers of the excellent Say No! More.
Kotaku
Grimace, an ancient McDonalds character who—recent marketing blitz aside—may be so unknown among younger readers they will actually need to consult a website to find out who the hell he is, has for a very long time had an extensive page up over at the unofficial McDonalds Wiki. Until this week, at least, when…
Kotaku
Next Fest is Steam’s triannual event where hundreds of developers upload demo builds of their games for you to try for free. And it’s one of the very few things in gaming that just feels unambiguously positive! Indie sits alongside—or often above—AAA, nothing is about gouging anyone, and it revives the lost art of the…
Kotaku
During 2023's Summer Game Fest, something really rather awkward became all too apparent as the gruelling hours of commercials wound on: there were no women on stage. At the time, Kotaku and others wondered of frontman Geoff Keighley why this happened, but answers weren’t forthcoming. Since, Keighley has spoken to…
Kotaku
Gaming still isn’t all about you. New data released by PwC shows that “traditional” games make up only 26.7 percent of the revenue earned by the U.S. games industry, the vast majority of 2022's $54.1 billion coming from social or casual games. Esports, meanwhile, contributed just 0.8%. Added together, that total also…
Kotaku
When it comes to buying Pokémon trading card packs, there’s pretty much one thing that people care about the most: pull rates. What are the chances of getting a special card in any given foil-wrapped packet? And with early 2023's Crown Zenith set, they suddenly got a whole lot better. Then, come the Scarlet & Violet…
Kotaku
Overwatch 2's fourth season blessed players with the fabulous, sexy support hero Lifeweaver. But unfortunately, for those who wanted to run around with this gloriously pink and pansexual healer, he hasn’t exactly made waves as a strong support hero. Quite the opposite, in fact, as the community has basically all but…
Kotaku
I don’t know about Eternights just yet. I played the opening chapter of Studio Sai’s Persona-influenced action game/dating sim hybrid at Summer Game Fest, and on paper, a game that combines those elements should be my jam. But while what I played demonstrated good foundations and fun ideas, it didn’t make the best…
Kotaku
It’s been a couple of weeks since Blizzard’s latest ARPG adventure Diablo 4 opened its hell gates to the public. With players cumulatively logging in “over 276 million hours” into the game, it’s always a fun time to look at something everyone loves: stats! Blizzard has some fun facts to share with us today. What class…
Kotaku
Last week, the New York Times announced its latest puzzle had gone live for beta testing on its puzzling site. Joining the world famous crossword, and of course Wordle, is Connections. It’s a four-by-four grid of words, that you need to rearrange into four connecting groups. And if you happen to live in the UK, that’s…
Kotaku
Soulslike fans, looking forward to getting their hands on Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn via Xbox Game Pass, will have to stare far further into the future. The next game from the developers of 2018's Ashenhas now been delayed a full year from its previous “early 2023” release date, to an even more ambiguous “2024.”
Kotaku
Pokémon games have dealt with death before, but it’s often in subtext. This goes as far back as the original Pokémon Red and Blue, as fans have long speculated that your rival Blue’s Raticate passed away after a rough battle. In recent years, mortality has become a more common theme in Pokémon games. AZ, a major…
Kotaku
The board game Puerto Rico was released in 2002, and while it by all accounts played very well, it was also a deeply colonial game that made light of the fact you were being asked to build a commercial empire large part on the back of slavery.
Kotaku
The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom is a big game set on a huge open world, and its codebase must be straining at all times to keep track of everything that’s going on. Which probably explains why it doesn’t matter how many times Nintendo patches the game to remove a resource glitch, people just keep on finding…
Kotaku
Twitch’s biggest streamer, Félix “xQc” Lengyel, is signing with the company’s newest rival, Kick, a streaming platform that offers better revenue splits and also appears to be centered around online gambling. The non-exclusive deal is valued at up to $100 million over two years, and is the latest and biggest blow to…