Let’s cut to the chase: I don’t like you. I don’t like your approach to gaming news, I don’t like your utter disdain for your readers, and I don’t like the blog network you’re a part of. It wasn’t always that way - Kotaku was my go-to site for gaming news for the longest time until I realized that at least 50% of your news output in a week had bugger-all to do with games or the game industry, or if they did it’s because you’d shoehorned a link in.

You claim to be “the gamer’s guide”, and yet gaming seems to be more or less the lastthing any of you have any real interest in. Indeed, your latest trend for gaming news has been to spit it out as quickly as possible without giving further details or, in some instances, citing sources. And yet you’ll post lengthy diatribes on Japanese culture, or scientific discoveries. Do you really care so little about games? In what way can you possibly describe yourself as “the gamer’s guide” when your posts about games are so small but your posts about brains go on forever?

The sad fact of the matter is that your site is far more interested in pageviews, clickthroughs and ad revenue than it is in creating interesting, compelling content. You will find any excuse to post stuff that has no gaming connection whatsoever, or if there is a connection it’s so incredibly tenuous. You know this, I know this, Jim Sterling knows this, and yet you continue this facade of being for the gamers. I’m sorry, but you really aren’t. I’d have much more respect for you if you just admitted to what you are. There’s no shame in it. Well, there is some shame, but fuck it - you’re Kotaku, one of the biggest gaming sites on the internet. People need to come to you for their news anyway, so fuck ‘em, right? You already hate your readers anyway, may as well come out in the open about it.

You can’t handle criticism, either. You can’t. Your readers will try it on occasion and they’ll find themselves getting their comments deleted and their accounts banned, all for stepping out of the Kotaku comfort zone. You don’t like being told that what you’re doing is uninteresting or irrelevant and so you surround yourself with Yes Men and people too scared to criticize what you do because for some reason their Kotaku account means something to them. Glod only knows why. I wouldn’t want to be a part of a community where you can be outcast by the Powers That Be simply for speaking your mind.

I’m sure you’ll dismiss this post as “Haters Gonna Hate” and that’s usually healthy, although it might be worth asking yourselves why so many haters say so many of the same things. I don’t personally believe in the axiom “There’s no smoke without fire,” but when your readers and critics can see not only the smoke but the very flames they emanate from - flames that Kotaku’s writers either try to make excuses for or ignore outright - then maybe there’s something there. Maybe there’s something to it.

And, y’know, you can continue to excuse the flames. It’s possible to continue existing with parts of you on fire (Los Angeles manages it for a good chunk of the year, so why can’t you?), but you may not be able to recover from the damage.

T’rah.