Even the massive money-making game publisher Activision lays off people from time to time, as the company confirmed today that they’ve cut about 30 jobs from their global work force. Kotaku first heard that the cuts were affecting Treyarch, the studio behind Call of Duty: Black Ops II, but a spokesperson for Activision said that…
The PBS NewsHour looks at violent video games tonight, in a segment that includes your Kotaku EiC. Livestream at 6pm ET
A couple of writers for this site recently proposed that we stop previewing games. We could still talk to developers before games come out, they suggested. We could still visit studios early or even play games before release, but somehow, some way, we’d no longer write previews. Given that I prefer to be absolutist only…
Totilo and Crecente (yeah, that guy!) discuss the next PlayStation on the latest episode of the Bonus Round
I admit that I’ve had my doubts about Assassin’s Creed III in the three months since I had last played it. I had my doubts that the game, buggy and rough-edged as it was, deserved the very positive review I gave it last October. I had my doubts when my colleagues Luke and Kirk, representing…
I thought I was on another planet on Wednesday when I saw Alex Ward for the first time in five years. This was Criterion’s Alex Ward, the developer of a game studio that pushes gaming hardware to the brink and that hasn’t made a game for Nintendo in 10 years. He was saying nothing but…
Recently, people wanted to gamify things. That’s “game-i-fy,” as in “turn stuff into games,” which more or less meant “add points to stuff we don’t like to do to make those things more fun.” One of the patron saints of this stuff was supposed to be Jesse Schell, a game designer and teacher who described…
Gamasutra: Nintendo sold under 60,000 Wii U’s in the U.S. in Jan. A lower monthly total than Xbox 360 or PS3 ever hit.
12 out of 15 video game creators would make a new Star Wars game, Wired discovers. (Prepare for a twist ending.)
Our redesigned, car-loving pals at Jalopnik have played some of May’s Grid 2. They detect a viable Forza competitor.
“At the end of the day, Ouya is beautiful, but people don’t buy consoles,” the woman behind the Android-based home console that is coming out next month recently said to me. “They buy content.” She’s right, right? Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman said this while she and I chatted in Las Vegas last week. People get…
Nintendo has been so busy announcing sequels to every Mario sub-franchise that you can think of—new sidescrollers, new 3D platformers, new Golf, and Mario & Luigi—that you’d think they don’t have anything else. Well, other than Zeldas. Not quite. As they’ve quietly been doing, Nintendo is continuing to create and add to new franchises through…
A new Mario Golf game is coming from longtime series developer Camelot. The game, called Mario Golf World Tour will be out this summer for the 3DS. It looks true to the series, featuring a medley of Nintendo characters (Donkey Kong, Bowser, etc.) in big, Mario-themed courses.
In an office in Union Square last week, BioShock Infinite ‘s lead creator, Ken Levine, said I could ask him about anything. He was in a kind and generous mood, offering me a strawberry from a bowl of them—he at eats at least half a pound of them a day, he told me. Anything? OK……
A week after it happened, you can now watch the DICE Summit’s kick-off talk between Star Trek/Star Wars‘ JJ Abrams and Steam/Half-Life 3‘s Gabe Newell. It was a fun talk that ended with Abrams and Newell talking about making games and movies together. That’s the news you probably saw last week. But watch everything that…
The moody, gritty PC/PS3/Xbox 360 shooter Metro: Last Light was supposed to come out in early 2013, which is probably why ads for it started showing up atop New York City taxi cabs many weeks ago. Then Metro‘s publisher, THQ fell apart. Metro will eventually be released by new publisher Deep Silver. For now, it’s…
EA tells RPS Medal of Honor games are on hold in favor of Battlefields b/c MoH lacked the best production leadership.
The next-generation Xbox—the one that will follow the still-popular Xbox 360—will run multiple games at once, require game installations, and will only work when a much-improved version of the popular but divisive Kinect sensor array is plugged in, according to a source who says he has access to development hardware. Those are a just a…
On Friday, we brought you the story of Jon, a Nintendo fan who spent $400 downloading old games to his Wii, but, through a mistake of his own and due to Nintendo’s unusually strict digital-downloads policy, found himself with access to none of those games. The lesson: a Nintendo machine isn’t like an iPhone; your…
The popular, left-leaning Facebook group that mistook me for a gun nut last month has pulled the image of me that they put on their site. They actually pulled it on Monday, shortly after I ran an article illustrating the hilarious cluelessness of many of the Facebook page’s users—many of whom thought I was holding…
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