Kotaku's Owners Have Attempted To Pivot The Site Away From News And Towards Game Guides

As if the realm of gaming journalism wasn't already on shaky ground in 2024, Kotaku's Editor-in-Chief, Jen Glennon, has resigned in protest after the site's owner, G/O Media, apparently indicated it wanted Kotaku to de-emphasize news reporting and skew more towards game guide creation. Glennon's letter of resignation offers a scathing rebuke of the current management and ownership at G/O Media:

After careful consideration, I have concluded that the current management structure and decision-making processes at G/O Media are not aligned with my values and goals for Kotaku

I firmly believe that the decision to ‘invert’ Kotaku's editorial strategy to deprioritize news in favor of guides is fundamentally misguided given the current infrastructure of the site

In its reporting of the situation, Aftermath indicated that one source still at Kotaku indicated that G/O Media indicated a guide creation goal for the remaining staff at around 50 guides per week. It is important to note, that in November of 2023, G/O Media hit Kotaku with redundancy layoffs amounting to twenty-three people which reduced the site to under ten paid staff members. Furthermore, G/O Media has joined Red Ventures in exploring using AI to generate content on its subsidiaries, which includes Kotaku, Gizmodo, Quartz, The A.V. Club, and The Onion, against the protests of editors on those sites.

If there is some good news, it is that it appears that the remaining staff at Kotaku have been in unison about resisting this change and G/O Media may be balking at their original plan. Senior editor at Kotaku, Alyssa Mercante shared this on Twitter:

Nonetheless, if G/O Media's efforts are successful, it would be another devastating loss to the gaming journalism profession and the loss of yet another source of gaming reporting.

What a weird time to try something like this. How the hell do you expect to compete with other providers that are so far ahead on that front? Are people gonna use Kotaku over Fextralife, Fandom, Gamefaqs, Youtube, Steam, and every other outlet already making guides a higher priority. I could imagine a slight increase in traffic but not enough to be substantial. Not to mention the amount of staff available and willing on top of the weekly goals.

This sounds like a dying gasp.

By game guides, I assume they mean the "Here's how to get the whatever item in this game" and not full walkthroughs, right? Are those the things just doing way more traffic than news or something? Just curious because I've never used any of those types of guides. Am I an old man for still skimming through a gamefaq for my guide needs?

Kotaku also shut down it's comments yesterday, and not due to huge flame wars like the alleged reason they did that to the Root, but due to too much discussion on this topic and specific criticism to Jim Spanfeller management of G/O media, resulting in multiple institutions being striped of most staff and/or selling off the name. A lot of former Kotaku editors (the names you likely associate with the site) formed a new company last year called Aftermath and have written up some thoughts on things.

It's one thing to kill a brand, that has been happening left and right and it is awful, but I've become a bit numb to it, but literally shutting down comments because the CEO doesn't like being referred to a an "herb", which is a pretty mild slang term for loser, is just so weak and thin skinned, that seems significantly stupider than an already stupid track record with this guy. To be honest, most the front facing staff there aren't super well-known and seem pretty young in their careers, and I can't help but think this is likely the end to their journey, since it's not like there are a ton of vacant positions out there.

The only model that seems to be surviving is the patreon niche model. Minn/Max, Kinda Funny, Second Wind, Remap. These seem to be sustaining, at least for now, but Rob Zacny mentioned in Remaps latest podcast that these walled gardens don't have a lot of outreach potential, and thus will likely dry up their own wells eventually. This all seems like the advances stages of the cancer that is killing news media across the board, games and otherwise, and I worry about the long term harm that the lack of reliable news outlets that just say what the news is will soon be completely replaces by echo chambers, far worse than it already is, regardless of skew.

And that's not even getting into the "news written by AI" shit. This is the cyberpunk future, and it sucks.

I think that the "guides" people are talking about (which are more spoilery clickbait hyperspecific things than traditional guides) are very cheap and easy to produce, as opposed to news, which can be time consuming to gather and even expose you to legal action. That's probably what's motivating this over "guides do better than news" which the Kotaku staff has said is not actually true.

I don't fully understand how we reached this point in the media landscape where it seems like every single outlet is getting shuttered or made crappier. Maybe I'm just old and people don't want this stuff anymore, the same way that people stopped wanting gaming magazines after the websites came out, but the difference is that the websites were better than the magazines (because they could put stuff up immediately and they didn't have to squeeze reviews or articles into limited page space) while what's replacing the gaming websites is like Twitter feeds and Youtube channels, most of which just feed off the actual few remaining news sites for their content.

G/O Media is known for garbage practices and for running websites into the ground (they don't actually own all the sites that @zombiepie mentioned because some were destroyed and had their corpses sold off) so this isn't shocking, but obviously it isn't just them.

We are in a grim media landscape, not just in gaming but in general, and everything seems to be getting worse. I'm not generally a pessimist when it comes to progress and maybe it's just me getting older, but the things replacing what we used to have just seem objectively worse, and while some of the new things are cool and interesting and great, they don't do the basic and necessary stuff that the old dying media used to.

@brian_: It's like 10 things I wish I new before starting Palworld" type guides. One guide in particular got a lot of criticism because it was literally just saying what the in-game tutorial does, nothing more. Real "press the A key to type the letter A" type stuff.

Sometimes the "guides" are news reports in hiding in an attempt by management to get on the good side of Google's algorithms.

Generally speak, yes. Sometimes you get article that explain how to get new cosmetic upgrades in an online multiplayer without shelling out money. Sometimes you get fragmented suggestions on how you can level up a character in an RPG. Other times, it's a simple summary of patch notes.

Thank you for pointing this out; I fixed this.

@zombiepie: @tartyron: Yeah. I know a lot of them, if not all, get pretty bad and blatant in how obvious their existence is purely to drive up views from s.e.o. I'm just wondering if any of that stuff actually works for the sites that use them.

@brian_: They clearly work for some sites or multiple sites wouldn't be doing them.

An important point of any "does it work for X" calculation is the cost to produce the stuff. The fact that they thought they could get 50 guides a week out of a small remaining staff shows just how cheap it is. If you can produce something that will get 1/3 the views of a really good news piece but it takes 1/4 the person hours then, at least in the short term, you come out ahead in the transaction.

In the long term you may drive your audience away by not providing a reason for them to come to your site in the first place (people may click on these guides and sometimes search for them but who goes back to a site to see which latest hyperspecific guide they have out?) but G/O's specialty is shortsighted thinking that eventually destroys websites.

Don't forget IGN, who already dominate SEO when it comes to guide-like articles, walkthroughs, and searches. They're always either at the top or near the top for any guide-related search result. Kotaku is not going to be able to compete with IGN alone, not to mention all of the other competition in this space.

This whole move seems incredibly misguided. The whole game guide business is already severely oversaturated (not to mention that for every legit guide website like IGN or RPGSite there's like 10 that are blatantly plagiarizing them all and SEOing their way above legitimate sites). G/O seem to be trying to get in on a gold rush long after all the other miners are already either settled in or in some cases leaving because of how awful that market is to compete in. If they wanted to do this, they should have done it years ago. It's an extremely stupid thing to do just from a business perspective. From a journalism point of view, it's really sad. We need more reliable news outlets reporting on things, not fewer.

I fear for a future where game guides go the direction of food recipes, with 12 paragraphs of preamble of the author's deeply rooted excitement about where the collectibles are in the jungle level in Tomb Raider.

There's no doubt SEO value in being at the "how to do X in popular video game" search results but it feels that IGN and Youtube already have that thing covered. I've been using the IGN guides a few times as having some sort of a graphical presentation is sometimes just easier to read than a long text file on GameFAQs.

If Kotaku goes under, I can't say that I'll miss them. Every time I visit their site I am quickly reminded of a reason that I don't visit them very often.

Or family stories about their grandpa's expertise at Pacman and Pong, and how enjoyment of video games has been passed down in their family for generations culminating in them becoming an expert in playing games using methods learned playing games with their parents as a child. Also neatly staged photographs of the game in question being played on their TV in their perfectly clean living space.

If I had to guess, I bet most of the guides Kotaku already puts out are just a collection of information they have taken from Reddit.

@bigsocrates: People might be sick of hearing it as an explanation, but "what happened to all these sites" is: late-stage capitalism. "Profits NOW NOW NOW NOW, why are we making $5 reporting the news and providing a service when we could be making $6 churning out crap and paying 1/4 of the staff so I can raise my salary?"

It really is just that simple: slash and burn for profit.

@undeadpool: Sure it's late stage capitalism, but that's been going on since at least Reagan. The media deregulation has had a big impact, but recently there's something else that seems to be happening specifically in news. We're seeing consolidation everywhere, but while it's bad that Disney bought Star Wars, it hasn't led to Star Wars being sidelined and replaced by something else. We're getting more Star Wars than ever.

And a lot of these sites are not generating more profit, they're collapsing and being shut down, which is not profitable.

Of course I know how Venture Capital works, and how often it destroys the businesses it buys, but this seems more consistent than even the VC curse. Journalism has collapsed despite there still being somewhat of a demand for it, and many of the companies being profitable. It's more than late stage capitalism because while this does happen in other sectors, it doesn't happen as consistently.

Simply put, when you have a business run by a bunch of sociopathic, mercenaries, integrity goes out the window. The only thing they care about is maximizing profits for their future bonuses. Sadly, the whole world seems to be run by these type of people now, which is why everything is going downhill. And with AI now in their hands, its only going to get worse. Kotaku is just the latest of many more stories to come.

'50 guides per week' alone is reather ridiculous considerling they only have so many ppl ..sheesh what a hell pit it has to be over there i feel bad for them

@styx971:There's a simple solution to this problem - remove the 'people' from the equation. In fact they just posted what seems like the first article attributed to Kotaku Bot, whose byline page reads "These stories were produced with the help of an AI engine.".

https://kotaku.com/best-video-game-weapons-guns-sword-rank-halo-series-1851366821

(Even the URL reads like SEO slurry)

"Several people named Kingdom Hearts’ keyblades as their favorite weapons, which makes sense as they can look so wildly different depending upon the wielder and the location in which the weapon is being used. Writer and comedian Jake Steinberg likes Mickey’s keyblade in particular, writing on X: “Sora’s running around with this mysterious key-shaped weapon then BAM the mouse himself shows up and the gold color makes me think he’s already gotten mastery over this thing! Then you learn it’s the realm of darkness counterpart to Sora’s keyblade like [shocked face emoji].”

Shocked face emoji, kids.

@mach_go_go_go:

Many of these entries are attributed to actual individual people so unless Kotaku is lying this is either a mix of AI and human content or it's human content edited or compiled by AI.

On the other hand:

I do not know if God has a cock, but I imagine it would feel similar to the M6D Pistol from Halo: CE.

That is....not exactly the tone I have come to expect from Kotaku. I don't consider myself prudish but I did not enjoy reading that.

Is a bad list about video game weapons really the place for R rated theological questions?

@bigsocrates: I honestly can't tell, but the phrase '[shocked face emoji].” being left as-is in the article tells me that, if any, there was minimal human involvement, or the involvement of a single or small group of individuals being asked to copy-edit their replacements. At the very least, it's going to be damn interesting to follow the career of new ascribed journalist Kotaku Bot and where their videogame list and guide writing abilities take us.

@mach_go_go_go: Without seeing the original Tweet I can't tell if Steinberg wrote that himself as a kind of cheeky joke, or if he used a shocked face emoji or whatever.

On the other hand I cannot actually FIND said Tweet and the link in the article isn't to a Tweet at all. Furthermore Jake Steinberg isn't, as far as I can tell, a comedian but rather a video game pundit type. I guess he has a comedic take on some stuff so maybe calling him a comedian is fair?

Regardless this seems like it might be an invented Tweet (at the very least it is deleted and the link to nowhere is very bad) so I may have been way too generous and this could just be raw AI with nobody even copychecking it, in which case, yikes yikes yikes that would be a VERY swift fall for Kotaku.

Man this is depressing. When I think of Kotaku I think of Mike Fahey (which is already sad) and of course Totilo. For it to be turned into THIS in so few years...

I can't even laugh at it.

Using a bot to generate the body of an article then the bot hallucinating some of the content (in this case a tweet) is extremely on-brand for the current generation of LLM bots, so this isn't surprising. It would not shock me to find out that current management is forcing writers to write a paragraph or two then use the bot to finish the rest of the article.

These text generation bots becoming a thing at the same time as the current awful trends in business begin to dominate is really sad to see. The type of business person who thrives in this environment generally has no concept of actual product quality and only care about numbers, so when they see a tool that produces an absolutely awful product but that can help artificially boost their numbers, they flip out since they can use the tool and go to their superiors and say "NUMBER BIGGER. GIVE BONUS". I used to give them the benefit of the doubt that they understood that the product they wanted created using these tools was bad, but I'm at the point where I genuinely think they don't understand why this stuff is awful. These are people with literally no creativity and view inherently creative fields like journalism/writing as something that can be manufactured like a packaged good. They don't seem to understand why people think this stuff sucks or why it's a bad look for them to use these AI tools in place of people. Either that or they don't care. It's not great either way.

All of this "AI"/LLM garbage needs to have an Emperor's New Clothes moment. Badly.

@bigsocrates:Upon further investigation (internet rabbit-holes are fun!), this is what the article links to as Jake Steinberg's tweet. I'm not pasting it as a link because I don't want to set off the spam filters.

http://sora's%20running%20around%20with%20this%20mysterious%20key-shaped%20weapon%20then%20bam%20the%20mouse%20himself%20shows%20up%20and%20the%20gold%20color%20makes%20me%20think%20he's%20already%20gotten%20mastery%20over%20this%20thing!%20%20then%20you%20learn%20it's%20the%20realm%20of%20darkness%20counterpart%20to%20sora's%20keyblade%20like/

Here's the slide for reference.

...Look, I don't use twitter and I know how twitter works, but I look at that link and - nuh uh. This isn't a deleted tweet, this is just sadness. I would love if someone who used twitter sent the Kotaku slide to Jake Steinberg and got a response from him. And I would extra, extra love it if the word salad spinner they now have working over at kotaku.ai machine-generated a Kotaku article about a Kotaku article misquoting someone, as the snake continues to eat it's own tail. Then later in the afternoon the bot could post a quick guide on how to get all romance options for Shadowheart in Metal Gear Solid 4.

@ben_h: I don't understand these people. Even in packaged goods some form of quality control matters. If you buy toilet paper and it's scratchy or falls apart when you use it you won't buy that brand again. You can't just shove anything into a package and sell it and maintain a profitable business.

It's like the businesspeople have the same understanding of business that the AI does of content, which is none.

@mach_go_go_go It definitely looks like an AI generated word-salad Tweet to me. This is what a real Tweet link looks like:

https://twitter.com/JeffGrubb/status/1772963310335381799

@mach_go_go_go: i'm not suprised considering the news but damn if that isn't ...something ick lol

Disappointing but not surprising, given that we're now eight years away from the acquisition in 2016 that looked fatal when it happened. I can't believe any of these Gawker-era castoffs are still around at all. I don't mean this disrespectfully, but I think Kotaku's continued prominence in the years following is more of a reflection of the (still!) dwindling number of websites like them than anything else. I think eventually something good will happen for games writing but maybe it can't happen until everything leftover is completely gone and hollowed out. Even calling it a shift to "guides" is disingenuous, they'll just become yet another website with zombie content that exists solely to be another SEO-driven search engine clogger. Why not just pivot to tiktoks at that point? It's so bogus. and chiefly I feel bad for the young writers trying to build a career in an industry that seemingly only ever has bad things happen to it. Imagine getting a decent writing gig at a decent website--it's like a ticking time bomb.

I mean--when I think of what the AV Club has become, it's such a tragedy.

lastly: this is my first post here in years. nice to see so many names and icons I still remember from when I first joined GB in 2008. Hello old friends!

@regularassmilk: Christ, the AV Club Kinjapocalypse is probably my biggest forums-related heartbreak of all time. The comments were so key to my enjoyment of that site, particularly for the Simpsons Classic reviews, and one day they were basically gone forever. I guess I wouldn't have started posting here if that never happened (lurker since 2010), so there's one silver lining?

This whole thing is a colossally poor decision made by a thin-skinned loser who seems only capable of making poor decisions and failing upwards. I feel bad for everyone impacted and anyone who was still enjoying Kotaku's content.

I'm so tired of this shit. Just fucking soul-crushing.