Deus Ex Alpha

http://n4g.com/user/blogpost/dedicatedtogamers/521785

Increasingly, Kotaku has championed an agenda in their articles. Whether it's hunting for racial slurs in an innocent animal-based flash game, or making sure animated breasts aren't too big, or calling out developers for making what can vaguely be called a "gay joke", Kotaku is here to save the day!

[...]

About 27 months ago, Kotaku's parent company, Gawker, decided to revamp all of their site designs, which resulted in a MASSIVE decrease in site visits (and naturally, a massive decrease in ad revenue).

Been going on for a lot longer. Years, actually.

Gawker is almost as well-known for it's random UI changes as Facebook is. There is also doesn't seem to be any justifiable reason for them, either (just like Facebook's!), other than as a means of quickly decreasing market revenue (short-term, usually evens out long-term) and just plain alienating and frustrating their users.

Kotaku on the other hand is the kind of website who on one hand touts their freedom of speech through being a "blog" whilst using the other to proclaim they are a trustworthy journalistic "news" website. It's either one or the other, you can't be both (not by my definition of "blog", at least).

Kotaku has also posted large amounts of rumour-based, tactless garbage over the years. Kotaku is, in my eyes, no better than your average gossip girl: It's authors post whatever they hell they want that is at least somewhat relevant to gaming, without actually checking to see if it's factual or not.

too long; didn't read: Kotaku (and Gawker in general) has been a shoddily run website/business for years now, and yet too many websites continue to use it as a viable "source" for news when, quite frankly, I don't think it is. Once upon a time perhaps, but certainly not now.

I quite like the new Kotaku design and even added it into my RSS feeds, where as I rarely visited it when it had that previous look.


edit: brain packetloss fixed

Kotaku isn't an appropriate forum for these discussions. Some of the issues are important ones to address. But the cynic in me agrees that this isn't being done in a well thought-out and constructive way, it's all about sensationalist headlines to get ad clicks. It's great how they can shout about hot-button issues of gender in games in one breath, and then put out THIS in the next.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiuX6Pp_AwQ[/youtube]

Yay, double standards!