The game director for Blizzard Entertainment's upcoming Heroes of the Storm has apologized for his treatment of a question about how characters are designed—specifically how multiplayer online battle arena games, of which Heroes is one, tend to hyper-sexualize female avatars.
This is by far my favorite type of story to cover on weekends: The EVE Scandal! They're fun because they tend to involve big-ass space ships or wads of in-game currency that convert to mind-boggling sums in real life. This latest allegation features both.
A journalist says she was "completely dehumanised" on stage during an Xbox One Event at Eurogamer Expo 2013, by a comedian who made degrading jokes about her gender. Eurogamer Expo says it is investigating the matter.
Polytron, the studio behind the indie hit Fez, announced over its official Twitter that development on Fez II has been canceled. It appears to be related to a very heated Twitter argument between Polytron founder Phil Fish and an Internet personality who sharply criticized him today.
A transit-map enthusiast who painstakingly redesigned Boston's MBTA rail map says The Last of Us took his work, without his permission and without compensating him, for use in the game. He's not happy about it.
No longer will Command and Conquer's militant "Global Liberation Army" feature generals of obvious Middle Eastern descent, once the game goes free-to-play. Polygon reports that Victory Games made the decision because some folks didn't like the implication that Middle Easterners were a bunch of militant terrorists.
The world's best selling video game won't be sold in Pakistan. Fox News reports that a declaration has forbidden sales of Activision's Call of Duty games, as well as EA's newest Medal of Honor release.
Studios may close, servers may crash, projects may be canceled and bankruptcies filed, but these are the given in the video games industry. No matter how regrettable, they still won't be the No. 1 heated controversies in any given year for video games.
Forgive me, I had not heard of The Hunger Games before I posted an item about Canabalt's creator
Not finished talking about the ending of Mass Effect 3? Bring your ideas to Kotaku Game Club tomorrow at 4pm eastern. We'll be having our own climactic battle over the ending and the controversy, so don't miss it!
The fury will not abate over Mass Effect 3's "From Ashes" extension
The Stop Online Piracy Act, currently a bill before the Congress, is utterly detested by the Internet, in case you don't read the Internet. Gamers don't think much of it either, as it would have some rather stupid ramifications
If someone was going to sue over an iPhone app called "Jew or Not Jew," I would have expected it to be an infringement claim coming from Saturday Night Live, or Al Franken, the Minnesota senator who wrote a sketch by that name which aired in 1988 here in the U.S. Instead, it was an action brought under France's…
The trailer for "Slavery: The Game,"
Hoping to assuage customers angry over having their games opened and rifled through prior to purchase, GameStop is offering everyone that purchased the regular edition of Deus Ex: Human Revolution for the PC a $50 gift card and a Buy Two, Get One Free used game purchase, according to a leaked memo. All better now?
After getting into hot water earlier today for opening new PC copies of Square Enix's Deus Ex: Human Revolution and removing codes for a free OnLive version of the game prior to sale
While I don't read any statements or endorsements of historical viewpoints behind this, Microsoft had to figure someone would notice that it's now selling a Confederate Army uniform for your Xbox Live avatar's virtual dress-up and call it out as a borderline offensive gesture. One of our readers saw it, and did.
With juggernauts like the Call of Duty franchise set to make their annual sales record breaking splashes this fall, we don't have to look far to be reminded that video games make heaps of money. However, SuperFLI wonders if this causes more harm than good to the industry as a whole.
This week was the first time we heard
Developer High Voltage Software is currently embroiled in some controversy over their reaction to Joystiq's Conduit 2 review. How could a game that ends this brilliantly get such a low score? In case the title didn't tip you off, spoilers.
The attempt to include overt references to Judeo-Christian figures in the classic role-playing game Xenogears caused a few translators to quit — they feared a violent backlash — and prompted a change in the name of the game's final boss, according to one of the people who brought the game to America.
The intentionally, unabashedly offensive School Shooter: North American Tour 2012
A glowing fan review for Dragon Age II on Metacritic discovered to have been written by a member of the game's development team sparked outrage among the gaming community yesterday. EA's response? That's how it works.
If turning the plight of illegal immigrants risking their lives to sneak into the U.S. into a goofy iPhone racing game didn't amuse critics of Smuggle Truck: Operation Immigration, maybe the game's legal immigration mode will.
Even though the game ratings authority in the U.K. says "the average 16-year-old would think everything in We Dare was beneath them," politicians, parents and media there are apoplectic that Ubisoft's ridiculous swinger-party game was rated a 12 - meaning suitable for kids.
One of the two experts quoted in Fox News' notorious hit-piece on Bulletstorm
The phone has been ringing repeatedly today at New York's Chinatown Fair, a beloved arcade in downtown New York, thanks to word on Facebook that the place was shutting down
After officials in El Paso, Texas, made their discomfort over Call of Juarez: The Cartel last week, the Mexican state of Chihuahua is asking Federal authorities for an outright ban on the video game that hits too close to home.
Long story short, this modder built a controller that, when plugged into a Nintendo Entertainment System, auto speedruns Super Mario Bros. in just a shade under 5 minutes. Naturally, commenters have shouted it down as a fake, but the Tool-Assisted Speedrun community is unanimous in calling the mod real.
