The end of Kotaku?
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Guides? On a politics site?
"How to be a Feminist in GTA6"
"Organizing a BLM rally in Shadow of Mordor"
Any of the Kotaku people bawling about having to post about video games could easily generate 7 of these per week with ChatGPT but they're too stupid and hysterical to even consider it
video gAMeS ArE pOliTIcAL!
Fucking k3k
50 guides a week seems excessive. Are they trying to get them to quit?
Oh no! Anyway...
I'm hoping this will make them implode.
Highly likely. Even if they change course to become game journalists instead of lying activists that do not play games, what is their target audience? No self respecting gamer reads that trash, their audience is 100% leftists.
Yeah, that’s what I find weird. Are they seriously trying to pivot to being a game site? They know the reputation they have, right? You can’t just cast that off by putting up shitty “guides.”
They're targeting ad revenue from gaming SEO, which should be easy because Google likely already rigs the algorithm in favor of Kotaku. They want those IGN and Polygon clicks. Even Forbes is doing that shit.
Maybe they'll redeem gamer journos by posting a video of a completed Cuphead tutorial.
They’re gamers, mot miracle workers.
Depending on state law, it could be illegal for an employer to do something like that to pressure employees to quit.
They're just going to be ripping off reddit posts and steam guides full time.
They aren’t full guides. More like “here’s where to set up your base to get infinite sulfur in Palworld.”
50 guides is easy when you take 2 guides and break them into 25 articles each.
50 guides per the whole staff, not per writer. Plus they're telling them to just plagiarise from other guides without checking if they need to to meet the quota. It's just regular old content mill shit.
Depending on the "guide" it might not even be possible, because if it's guides to end game stuff, there's no way someone can complete 50 different games a week.
These content mill guides are always broken up into tiny, specific guides. Like 100 "where does this one specific Pal spawn in Palworld?". More page views as people click between them and easier to get top result for specific problem searches.
Oh. Yeah, that's a different story. I haven't looked at any of that stuff in forever, so I have no idea what they're supposed to churn out.
"Hey you're a gaming journalist, could you try gaming journalism. Preferably a lot of it?"
OH MY GOD, THEY WANT US TO ACTUALLY DO THE THING?!?
WE QUIT
Good.
Bye.
Edit: Almost forgot. For what it's worth: If it's 50 total, and there's like 25 of them working there, that should really easy. If it's 50 per person, that is highly unreasonable.
It was mentioning somewhere that they have 7 writers. So each journo needs to make 7 guides per week. Is not that unreasonable if we are talking about games they've already played but if you expect them to play the game and write it is not something they can easily do.
50 for 7 of them will be pretty rough, all things considered. If they have to divide the labor evenly, that's 7 or 8 guides per person. So they'll have to be like micro focused guides. Like how to find things, or how to get specific items. Or even lots of "Protip: Shoot at the Cyberdemon until it dies" sort of thing.
I could write 7 full guides a week if my job was literally "play videogames all day and write about it".
It is a little harder than you think. I had an extremely short lived job making guides for brady games back in the late 90s.
Getting far enough into a game to understand what is and is not needed, then writing a guide to get to X area, or to find item Y is not that tough. It's just pen and paper, or have an open txt file and write down what you'll need to do every so often.
But it means putting about 15 hours into a game at the very least. And you'd have to do that at least 3 or 4 times on other games. If you work an 8 hour shift, that's 2 days on one game. If they want your stuff by friday at closing time, that's only enough to really sink into about 3 games at best.
So it is a bit of a high number, considering the staff left there to do them.
Not they deserve any of your sympathy for any of the above. They're in their exact position, because they put themselves there.
Oh I was imagining salaried and playing in off-hours as well. Eat sleep shower play write repeat 168 hours a week outside of grocery shopping and funerals. Though I admit that's not so "fun" when it's your actual job.
This would require playing the games, which would ruin their skimming reddit for current 'hot thing' nuggets, funny screenshots, and edgelord comments to write filler articles about.
Kotaku writers are the type of people who would see playing video games as actual labor, and even more so if those are games they wouldn't pick for themselves. The "life is strange" crowd would see playing Helldivers as doing hard time.
So when kotaku dies what do we rename this place?
Kotaku Inaction.
Kotaku in traction
I feel like they've been zombies for a long time. The time of laughably bad, steaming-pile-of-dogshit hot takes has been over for quite a while. These days they're just a decomposing turd slowly circling the drain.
Between this and the GDC 'havin a scream', it feels like the good old days.
14 years too late. The damage is already done.
I took a look at their guides page and while they're not anything like full instructions you'd expect from the word "guide," they're fairly long articles about some trivial BS in one game or another clearly engineered to hit a word count. 50 guides at 7 writers a week is 1 guide per writer per day, which might not seem that bad, but just hunting for "hey, that's interesting!" subject matter takes a lot of time. It seems like management hates their "talent."
edit: as someone else pointed out, they're ripping off posts on reddit and Steam. Still, 50 "guides" per week well exceeds the supply of detailed posts for popular games.
I think Totilo has his own sub stack now. Most of the journalists are trying for substance and other status.