Why are you visiting Kotaku in the first place? The site is pure, concentrated AIDS.
All the remaining former Gawker sites are like this now. I read Jezebel and The Root a few times a week for laughs (and also to be informed of important issues to women, LGBTQ, and Black™ communities) and they barely seem to update now compared to the non-stop content churn they used to be. They're probably not going to shut down completely, but they'll keep getting pawned off to a different venture capital firm every year or two for less than what they cost the last time until they're all eventually owned by some sketchy Chinese media company that outsources all of their writing to Indians or Pakis who will work for peanuts.
Even if these sites are already past their prime and nobody visits them anymore, the damage they helped cause on American society and culture is going to take longer to fix.
I still can't believe what happened in the 2010s really happened, that you had all these websites that embarked on this great crusade to basically ruin American society and culture, while they aren't the sole reason why it happened, to some degree they were also simply riding a cultural wave, they are nevertheless a huge contributing factor.
I sure miss the year 2010, the last year before all that shit started, why did everyone just go so fucking insane after 2010? Hopefully we can start working our way back to what pre-2011 society was.
To people regarding Nintendo Power, it actually continued as a podcast, obviously it's not the same but it has a lot of the editors on board. It was endorsed by Nintendo too. Still a real shame Nintendo Power went away.
It's weird that even something as popular as NINTENDO can't keep a single magazine afloat, although to be fair they folded in 2012 when Nintendo was arguably in a slump, but post Switch it's weird that nobody has tried to bring it back.
But print magazines about gaming are close to being extinct, at least in the US, I go into a grocery store and in the magazine section I see print magazines devoted to all sorts of topics but not a single one even remotely related to video games, I do see a few in bookstores but we're literally down to just a handful left that are still active and it's only a matter of time until there's none left.
It'd odd though because there's still plenty of print magazines that are still being published so it's not like the entire medium is dead yet, but somehow only video game magazines are the ones close to being extinct.
The only reason anyone knew or visited Kotaku, minus GameGate/SocialJustice BS, was Jason Shreier, who's gone from there. Jason's the go-to guy for people in the industry who wanna leak stuff. Though even that's still mostly, at least half, just industry drama about employees and the businesses themselves rather than about GAMES. Seems like a lot of gaming journalism and discussion is just about that meta drama nowadays.
Yeah, you ever notice how little people talk about actual games anymore? It's mostly drama related to games, but not games themselves, one good example being the Animal Crossing hair controversy.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s people still talked about games themselves a lot even if it was mostly to hate on them, but not so much anymore.
Video games are simply not in a good state these days, a new generation has started but there's none of the buzz or excitement surrounding it like there was around a new generation in the past, not even a fraction of it, most people can't even get their fucking hands on a new console at all due to scalpers.
I think all the drama and all the political baggage surrounding video games sucked most of the fun out of it, it's simply no fun to get involved in the wider gaming culture anymore when there's so many lunatics who will literally try to destroy your life over petty bullshit (like say, you picked the wrong hairstyle in Animal Crossing, to use that example again), but there's also clearly problems with how games are even made these days (*cough*Cyberpunk 2077*cough*), everything just seems to be broken at a fundamental level at the moment.
I know personally I'm looking forward to and will definitely play RE8 but after that I really feel like I might be done, either stepping away from video games completely or stepping away from modern games and focusing on the good games of yesteryear I haven't played yet because man, what a fucking mess modern gaming has become, when even fucking Animal Crossing causes people to have meltdowns, you know shit's bad lmao.
But then conventional gaming journalism is unnecessary nowadays. In the 90s, magazines were how you heard about games coming out and what was worth renting/buying - and also how studios got info about their games out to the public. In the 00s it was websites like GameTrailers. But now? Companies can directly put out media about their games to gamers. And gamers trust streamers and online social communities they're part of for information and opinions, rather than "game journalists" who are usually less informed, less competent, less accurate, etc. I can just look up some real non-lizardperson playing a game raw to see if its something I'm into. And if I was some game publisher or developer, I'd rather just send keys out to Lets Players or upload trailers to YouTube/Facebook/whatever than get in bed with these irrelevant media outlets.
I've taken a look around the websites and channels for these legacy gaming journo companies, and its just hollow trash. Their channels aren't worth subscribing to for game trailers / real news, because they tend to spam mostly wannabe Lets Play trash for more content, but it just means shit I'd have to sift through to find what I care about: game news/trailers. The websites are garbage hot-take clickbait like why Samus would be better as a tranny or at best their content is just "Hey, look at this popular Reddit thread we copied and put on our website!"
TLDR games journalists are completely useless middlemen in a world that no longer needs them.
It's incredible the downward spiral gaming journalism has been on when it was really looking like it was getting somewhere in the 2000s, now the entire thing is basically dead.
I still feel though like there's a market if a website brought back the vibe gaming journalism had in the 2000s, ie if it was actually about VIDEO GAMES.
