Shadow of the Tomb Raider Cost $75-$100 Million To Make, Eidos Says

Video game budgets are higher than they’ve ever been, and the new Tomb Raider is yet another example of that inflation, helping illustrate why big publishers are so desperate to get players to spend more than $60 on their games. “Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and other different AAA single-player games, cost $75 million to…

Is It Time To Finally Upgrade Your Console?

It’s hard to deny the appeal of a PlayStation 4 Pro, especially for those of us still playing on 1080p TV’s or those of us enjoying games with performance modes. The moment I changed that one setting and experienced combat in a smooth 60 frames per second in God of War, there was no way…

Behold Some Incredible Models And Dioramas

This is the work of a South Korean model builder and diorama maker who goes by the name “Gaia.” Damn, it’s good. As tipster Sang points out, his real name is Jung-hoon Ahn. He teaches model building and diorama making in Seoul, but his studio is in Busan. Gaia has been featured several times on…

Japan’s Top Anime Creators Make Excellent Commercials 

What happens when some of Japan’s top animators use their talents to sell bread, booze and buildings? Excellent commercials, that’s what. Yoshiharu Sato has an impressive resume: animator on Porco Rosso, key animator on Kiki’s Delivery Service, and supervising animator on My Neighbor Totoro—among others. Recently, he’s been focusing on commercials, and they’re terrific. Here…

Bridges. Kyoto, Japan. By ShuYung Wu. JPGs is a photo peek into wherever gamers might find interesting. If you’re a photographer and have images you want to share, drop us a line! 

Civilization VI Got A Few Updates Today

Civilization VI’s Spring Update (the game likes to do things in seasons) is now live, and while many of the changes it brings are just tweaks to various dials and figures, there are a few welcome new additions in there as well. The best is how joint wars now work, with players able to ask…

Chelsea goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois has got himself some new Fortnite-themed custom gloves. Via Footpack

Splatoon, The Most Fashionable Game Of All

Leland Goodman is an artist at Titmouse (Metalocalypse, Avatar’s intro), but she also has a very special side-project: a fashion zine based on Splatoon You can see some images from that book, along with some of her other work, below. And you can see more of Leland’s stuff at her personal site To see the…

Developer Kicked Off Steam For Posting Fake Reviews

Polish studio Acram Digital, who have released games like Steam: Rails to Riches and Eight-Minute Empire, have had all their content scrubbed from Steam after Valve caught them posting fake reviews of their own games. Purchasers of the company’s games—PC conversions of board game classics—had been complaining of not just the fake reviews (which have…

Formula 1 Fan Took A Game Boy Camera To A Race, And The Photos Are Fantastic

F1 fan Tim Binniongot to go to the Shanghai Grand Prix last month, and like most people lucky enough to see a race in person, he took a ton of photos. Thing is, amidst a sea of SLRs and iPhones, he took them on a Game Boy camera. Having grown up without the pleasure of…

Big Study Of 10 Million Steam Reviews Is Absolutely Fascinating

Steam reviews have a reputation for being whiny garbage, but they can still be really useful when the trash is filtered out and some serious data extracted. Which is exactly what this in-depth study of the service has found. An Empirical Study of Game Reviews on the Steam Platform is the name of a study…

A Nifty Switch Battery Case Became A Crowdfunding ‘Nightmare’

The complications that one Switch charging case’s crowdfunding campaign has run into only proves the old adage: “Mo’ money, mo’ problems.” The SwitchCharge is a case with a battery in it for the Nintendo Switch from the London-based company InDemand, meant to prolong the system’s battery life. When its crowdfunding campaign launched, Kotaku’s own Mike…

Valve Is Paying Hackers To Discover Security Flaws In Steam

Even Steam, the biggest PC gaming platform in the world, isn’t immune to hacks and other issues that have in previous years rendered private information woefully public. That’s where Valve’s new bug bounty program comes in. Bug bounty programs are common among major tech companies like Microsoft and Facebook. They task so-called “white hat” hackers—aka…

Turns Out We Have Thoughts On Brooklyn Nine-Nine Getting Canceled

Today, Fox announced that Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s fifth season will also be its last. As it turns out, many of us Kotaku and Compete watch the show, and we have some thoughts. Here’s a lightly edited transcript of how we reacted in our work Slack channel when the news dropped. Also, we found out which of…

VR Is A Real Trip

Today on Highlight Reel we have trippy VR, good audio cues, Thanos moments, and much more! Watch the video then talk about your favorite highlight in the comments below. Be sure to check out, like, and share the original videos via the links below. Subscribe to Kotaku on YouTube for more! Catch up on all…