Nathan Grayson

Overwatch League Cancels South Korea Matches Over Coronavirus Concerns

Late last month, Blizzard’s Overwatch League cancelled all matches scheduled to take place in China in February and March due to coronavirus fears. Now it’s cancelled matches for South Korea as well, just days before games were set to begin. The league made fans aware of the cancellations viaTwitter, writing, “In order to protect the…

Twitch has reinstated body painting streamer Forkgirl’s account after indefinitely suspending it last week for nudity In an email to Forkgirl, the company explained that, by its standards, she had not adequately covered her chest, but acknowledged that the rules may not have been entirely clear. Read more in my updated story

Body Painting Streamer Banned For Nudity Despite Efforts To Stay Within Twitch’s Rules [UPDATE]

Twitch’s policies around content it deems “sexual” are inconsistently applied, but body painting—creating art using one’s face and torso as the canvas—doesn’t run afoul of them. Body painting even has its own official tag on the streaming platform. That, however, has not stopped Twitch from indefinitely suspending a streamer who says she was doing everything…

WoW Classic Is Showing Me The Limits Of Nostalgia

Once every month or two, I have this dream. I’m standing in a cavernous entryway to what my brain tells me is absolutely a World of Warcraft raid dungeon. Its walls are streaked with throbbing orange and purple veins, akin to the armor sets dropped in Molten Core, an actual WoW raid dungeon. It is…

Wolcen Is A Diablo Clone With Big Potential And Bigger Bugs

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, an action role-playing game for PC in the style of Diablo that’s been making waves on Steam recently, has a lot going for it. There’s the gargantuan skill tree whose rings you can physically rotate to create near-limitless build possibilities. Eye-catching graphics that put it in league with upcoming genre megaliths…

‘Sam’s Story’ Sends Metro Exodus Off With A Bang And A Harmonica

“Sam’s Story,” the second of two planned DLC episodes for Metro Exodus, lets you do this thing where, if you come across select chairs dotting its rotting landscape, you can sit down and play harmonica. You, as Sam, will just jam over some grimly scenic vista. You can play for as long as you want.…

Overwatch‘s YouTube Deal Makes A New Brigitte Skin Costly For Most Players

Until February 19, Blizzard is offering Overwatch players a skin nobody asked for, but that is, admittedly, pretty funny: “Goat Brigitte,” a horned, blue-and-purple number meant to commemorate the notoriously unpopular “GOATS” meta that dominated OWL season two last year. There’s just one problem: It’s currently impossible to earn the in-game currency players need to…

Even Ronda Rousey Has An Exclusive Video Game Streaming Deal Now

Noted World of Warcraft fan, Mortal Kombat character, person with bad opinions about trans rights, and also WWE wrestler Ronda Rousey is diving headfirst into the lucrative world of video game streaming. She’s announced that, beginning next week, she’ll be doing it exclusively on Facebook. In a post on Instagram, Rousey described video game streaming…

Wide Ocean Big Jacket, A Chill Game About Camping, Is The Perfect Length

As a kid, I never liked camping. I went to a multitude of Boy Scout and church camps, but I could never escape an overriding feeling of anxiety, like the trees were going to close in and suffocate me with their bristly branches. Turns out, I was just doing it wrong. The camping trips I…

Why The Paris Overwatch League Team Is Based Out Of New Jersey This Season

After two seasons in Burbank, California, the Overwatch League has finally achieved its goal of scattering teams across the globe to their various home cities. Well, mostly. Paris Eternal, somewhat conspicuously, is operating out of New Jersey. New Jersey, in case you’re from a non-Earth planet, is not in France. A couple weeks before the…

Dragon Ball Z Abridged Comes To An Abrupt End

I’ll never forget the period of time during which a bunch of my friends got super into Dragon Ball Z Abridged, a YouTube series that cuts up episodes of Dragon Ball Z and stitches them back together with loads and loads of jokes. It was a different era of YouTube, the internet, and my life;…

Blizzard has addressed concerns surrounding glitches that arose during the world-first race to complete the Mythic difficulty version of WoW’s latest raid, Ny’alotha. Game director Ion Hazzikostas told Kotaku the team plans to “improve our internal testing processes as well as our responsiveness,” given that these races are often streamed live. Check out my updated…

World of Warcraft‘s Latest Boss Finally Goes Down After Glitchy, 10-Day Race Between Top Guilds [UPDATE]

The “Mythic” difficulty version of World of Warcraft’s latest raid, Ny’alotha, is a doozy. Top guilds began racing to complete the 12-boss hero sandwich of a dungeon on January 28, but it wasn’t until today that one guild, Limit, finally planted its flag at the top of the eyeball mountain that is the raid’s final…

Why Twitch Fans Donate Money To Wealthy Streamers

Early last year, then-Twitch streamer Jeremy “Disguised Toast” Wang received an email from a fan who’d donated $200 to him in 2018. “Hey, I donated money to you a year ago,” read the email according to Wang, who spoke to Kotaku over the phone. “I’m having hard times right now. Do you think you could…

How Twitch Encourages Fans To Obsess Over Streamers’ Viewership Numbers

Sit in any sizable streamer’s Twitch chat for long enough, and the topic of numbers is bound to come up. Why isn’t viewership what it used to be? Why has the streamer plateaued? Why aren’t they as big as [insert bigger streamer here]? After a while, it starts to wear on some streamers. Cory “King…

Temtem, As Told By Steam Reviews

Pokémon Sword and Shield were solid and all, but there’s a new Pokémon sheriff in town. And by “in town,” I mean “on PC.” Also, it’s not called Pokémon. Temtem is, instead, a carefully crafted tribute to Game Freak and Nintendo’s monster-battling monolith. Steam users, for the most part, love it.  I’ve been dabbling in…

Overwatch Is Making Big Changes To Keep The Meta ‘Fluid’

By this point, I would imagine that Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan is sick of talking about the meta. It’s a perennial topic among vocal portions of the Overwatch community and a near-constant source of consternation. The meta over-prioritizes certain heroes, say some people. It changes too slowly, say others, asking for MOBA-style solutions like hero picks…

Top Streamers Are Leaving Twitch Amidst Big Money And Shady Deals

Let’s say you’re an up-and-coming streamer. You’ve done it for a while and you make decent money, although you’re no Tyler “Ninja” Blevins. But you’re on your way there, or so you hope. A while back, you got the opportunity to sign with an agency that promised to help you set up deals to advertise…

Blizzard Owns Your Custom Warcraft 3: Reforged Games

It is a fact somewhat lost to time—though certainly not one Blizzard will ever forget—that the eternally enduring MOBA genre got its start in Blizzard games. Riot and Valve, however, ended up reaping the rewards of seeds that were sown by custom game-makers in StarCraft and Warcraft 3. After a 2012 lawsuit, Valve even got…

Temtem Takes The Pokémon Formula Online, But Doesn’t Do Much With It

The first time I met Temtem’s monster-bequeathing hot dad science lad Professor Konstantinos, I immediately began calling him Professor Oak. Just now, I had to look up his real name for the purposes of writing this piece. What I’m saying is, Temtem is a whole, whole lot like Pokémon That is not a bad thing,…