Nathan Grayson

Thousands Watch As GTA V Streamer Puts On Elaborate In-Game Concert

On Twitch, Grand Theft Auto V role-playing is a full-on phenomenon. Every day, streamers pretend to be criminals, cops, doctors, and other types of criminals. Together on a heavily modified custom server, they craft a 24/7 streamer cinematic universe of unfiltered, gleeful trash. With so many people now aboard the GTA V RP bandwagon, standing…

Track: Trust | Artist: Moon Tooth | Album: Crux Kotaku Soundtrack is a selection of the stuff we’re listening to at the moment.

Road To Guandong is a new road trip game in the style of Jalopy. Set in ‘90s China, it tells the story of recent art school graduate Sunny, who suddenly has to take over the family restaurant after her parents’ death. In the game, Sunny and her aunt will road trip through Guangdong, China, make…

You Can Now Pet The Dog In Enter The Gungeon, Thanks To That Twitter Account

You can pet the dog in Enter The Gungeon, but it was not always this way. Until recently, nobody could pet the dog, and times were dark indeed. Then a humble Twitter account stepped in and saved the day, at what turned out to be the very last minute. Enter The Gungeon, originally released on…

Four Players Have Quit Overwatch League In The Last Two Weeks

Expansion teams and new meta aside, Overwatch League season two has felt, for the most part, like business as usual. Behind the scenes, however, teams continue to practice, scrimmage, and prepare rigorously, all while planning for a third season in which they’ll move to their respective cities all across the world. It appears to be…

Why People Are So Mad About The Epic Games Store

For more than a decade, Steam has dominated the PC gaming market. More than 100 million people have amassed vast game collections on Valve’s platform, not to mention friends and communities. Now Epic is trying to muscle in on Steam’s turf, and a certain segment of PC game players are remarkably mad about that. Here…

Two days after the Borderlands 3 Epic Store exclusivity review bombs began, Steam’s new anti-review bomb system has kicked in. The scores of Borderlands 2, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, and Borderlands: Game Of The Year Edition have been marked with asterisks that denote “off-topic review activity” and returned to their pre-April 3 scores. The offending reviews,…

Borderlands Is Getting Review Bombed On Steam Over Epic Store Exclusivity [UPDATE]

Yesterday, Gearbox announced that Borderlands 3 will be an Epic Games Store exclusive for six months after its September 13 release. Like clockwork, Steam users began review bombing previous games in the noted dabbing robot shooter series shortly after. Twenty-four hours and thousands of negative reviews later, Steam’s new anti-review bomb system has yet to…

Fan-Made Overwatch Mode Makes Players Rely On Each Other To See

Overwatch is a game where visual language is paramount to keep the fast-moving action readable. Characters, for example, are designed so that their unique silhouettes are eye-popping even from far away. It also helps to be able to see anything literally at all—something you really come to appreciate when 90 percent of the screen is…

Epic Bans Stretched Screen Resolutions From Fortnite Tournaments, Upsetting Pros

Fortnite, like life, is full of mysteries. Why do we build if we’re only going to destroy? Can taking countless lives to survive a bloodbath really be considered a victory or, indeed, royale? What’s the deal with this tomato guy? Why is he smiling? What does he know? Then there’s the biggest question of all:…

Totally Accurate Battle Simulator Is Finally On Steam, And It’s Great

You might think that four gangly muppets pushing wheelbarrows have no place on the same battlefield as a battalion of catapults, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my time with Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, it’s that strategy requires an open mind. It also requires that you accept a fundamental truth of the universe:…

Valve Breaks Silence Around Artifact, Says It Plans To Fix ‘Deep-Rooted’ Issues

In the past week, Artifact’s peak concurrent player count hasn’t even reached 500. Mere months after its November 28 launch, the Valve-developed card game is floundering. Now the Artifact team has decided it’s time to reshuffle the deck. In a blog post breaking the lengthy silence surrounding the DOTA 2 spin-off’s uncertain future, Valve admitted…

Overwatch Pro Blocks Racist Message With His Own Face During Stream

During a recent stream, New York Excelsior Overwatch player and impossibly pleasant married person Jong-ryeol “Saebyeolbe” Park came up against a particularly unpleasant foe. Another player decided to use Overwatch’s in-game notification system to spam Saebyeolbe with a racist message he couldn’t immediately block. The racist assbag in question continuously sent Saebyeolbe friend requests using…

Swatter Tyler Barriss has received a 20-year prison sentence, according to Associated Press A longtime swatter, Barriss pled guilty in November to crimes that ultimately led to the fatal shooting of a man over a Call of Duty dispute. Prior to that, Barriss had called in phony bomb threats to the FBI, the FCC, schools,…

Popular Overwatch League Player Quits After Just One Month To Resume Streaming Career

Overwatch League has plenty of astoundingly skilled players, but very few stars whose popularity transcends the game’s still relatively niche esports scene. Now it’s time to mark another burgeoning name off the list, because Atlanta Reign’s Daniel “Dafran” Francesca has quit after just one month of play during his debut season. Dafran, a controversy-prone player…

Outward Is A Merciless Fantasy Game Where You’re Just A Regular Person

When I began Outward, I found myself surrounded by a murmuring crowd of villagers. They were gathered not to cheer my impending heroic escapades or tell me that I was destined to kill god, but instead to inform me that I was in debt, and I had five days to pay it off before I…

Excellent space train death adventure Sunless Skies is getting a big update. It’s called Wayfarer, and it’s the first of “several.” This one aims to provide “more to see and do during voyages.” On the menu so far: multiple narrative additions and a rework of Albion. The update pulls up to the station on April…

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, As Told By Steam Reviews

“Wait, they only die twice?” said all the literal title interpreters in the Steam community upon seeing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice’s name. They’ve since been shocked—shocked, I say—to find themselves dying many more times than twice. Like Kotaku’s own Natalie Degraffinried, Steam reviewers mostly love Sekiro, the latest deliciously murderful brainchild of Dark Souls director…

Othercide is a horror-themed take on XCOM-like turn-based strategy. It focuses on “the sacrifices you must make to prevent reality from shattering”—so, you know, light, easygoing fare that’s only as serious as few heart attacks. There’ll be a system that lets you interrupt enemy attacks, which sounds interesting. It’s out later this year.  

What Europe’s New Copyright Law Means For Twitch And YouTube

If you live in the European Union, or if you’re an avid fan of European politics (and who isn’t?), you’ve probably heard about Article 13 in the past handful of months. And if you heard about Article 13 from someone on the internet, that person probably didn’t have kind things to say about it. Article…