Why Sites Like Kotaku Deserve to Fail | A Hogwarts Legacy Review Rebuttal
There used to be a plethora of competition when it came to video-game news websites I would frequent. Sites like IGN and Gamespot were the juggernauts of the early days of the internet, with smaller sites like Joystiq, Gamesradar, and GiantBomb catching up as time went on. However, the number of sites I used to visit has dwindled significantly over the past two decades. They either changed to the point of no longer being recognizable, or they just went out of business. Many of my favorites that have disappeared operated like traditional news sites that would bring you the facts of the story, accompanied by opinions that were backed up with legitimate evidence, or at least some citations that would justify the point of view. It may not have always been “definitive” evidence that joined the opinion, but the authors typically followed the fundamental writing standard of supporting one’s views with concrete details.
These days, that sort of writing is hard to come by on even regular news websites, let alone those specifically focusing on video games. All that seems to remain are “news” websites that are no better than my own and are mostly just opinion platforms. Not to sound like a grumpy old man, but I thought that journalism even the video game variety used to mean something. I used to think that there was at least a little bit of prestige, authenticity, and respect to go along with it. You might say, “Well, what about this site? Why do you think that they have to be different or better than yours?” Glad you asked!
DagonDogs.com is just a blog space and I make no claims about being a journalist in any way. I just use this tiny platform to voice my opinions and thoughts in an obscure section of the internet. If you somehow have stumbled into this domain, it should become apparent very quickly whether my opinion or the topics I discuss are interesting enough to come back for more. I don’t claim to know any more or better than an average consumer of entertainment, and I certainly don’t claim to be more important than someone else who likes video games or movies; I’m just a guy with opinions and a website. I used to want to work in games journalism when the internet was still young. It was difficult to create your own website or a place to write about things in which you had some interest at the time. I even briefly attempted the freelance thing and worked with some passionate people to get a new game news site going, but I wasn’t able to keep up with all my projects in a way that I felt was fair or professional to them, so I went my own way.
What I’m getting at is: I’m not beholden to anyone with this site; it’s just a hobby of a person who doesn’t have any special access or influence. However, the people at sites like IGN, Gamespot, Polygon, and Kotaku are beholden to their audience because of their influence and the legacy of expectations and standards that come with established brands like theirs. For some time, Kotaku actually had more than just their one decent reporter (Jason Schreier) to do in-depth articles about important topics, such as employee abuse in big companies or misguided management stories that led to a studio’s failure. In addition, their reviews were more focused on the games themselves, instead of any additional information surrounding the game. Over the past decade, these sites have become less like their former selves and more like political soap boxes, as though social media didn’t already exist for that.
As technology has advanced, the difficult has become easy, and more things that used to require extensive resources or teams of people are far more accessible than they’ve ever been. If you want to write about video games or movies and report on subjects you like, you don’t need to get hired at a place to do it. You can quickly build your own website like this, or you can become a content creator on a streaming service and be your own boss. Countless people have done it already, and I think that’s a contributing factor as to why these places are starting to crumble. If you consider how the resurrected G4 closed within a year of being reestablished (for a number of Frosky pesky reasons), it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the competition from people “outside” the industry is getting stiffer.
The competition of independent content creators is not the reason why they should go away, however. The reasons I believe they deserve to disappear are that they have taken advantage of their position for too long, cultivated a close-minded audience, and exhausted all their integrity with one example after another of unprofessional or even unethical behavior. The reason I bring this all up and why I’m picking on Kotaku in particular is because of an article of theirs that came out recently (see below). I want to dissect some of it, as well as discuss a few of the bigger issues it intentionally and unintentionally raises. Buckle up, it’s going to be a long one.
Belabored Biases
Ever since the social media mob decided that J.K. Rowling should be exiled or exterminated for her opinions, I have not seen a video game “news” website more determined to to talk about how much they hate her and why you should hate her too than Kotaku and their affiliated domains. I find this statement stupid in and of itself because J.K. Rowling is an author, not a game designer, so why even talk about her on your video game website? Obviously, the aforementioned Hogwarts Legacy game is the basic justification, but I’ve certainly seen her name appear on the site (along with the word “transphobic”) without being related to the game. In the recent weeks leading up to and after the game’s release, I’ve seen them feature all sorts of articles from their own and affiliated domains. They’ve listed other games you could play instead of Hogwarts Legacy (link 1 & link 2). I’ve seen an article showing how you could play other games with mods in them to make you look like Harry Potter instead of Hogwarts Legacy. And as for the article I listed above, if you look at the actual URL, the word “transphobia” is in the web address. You’d think they really didn’t want you to buy this game, but I’ve also seen Kotaku feature an article from their affiliated site The Inventory, which advertises a discount on Hogwarts Legacy if you click the link they listed. Nothing like a little hypocrisy for the clicks to drive your point home.
For some reason, the people at Kotaku and other sites like it chose Hogwarts Legacy as the game to hate because it’s associated with the intellectual property (IP) created by Rowling. Never mind the fact that the IP also happens to be bigger than Star Wars. Never mind the fact that Rowling likely had minimal input on the development of the game. Never mind the fact that the game was developed by countless individuals of all different backgrounds who spent their own efforts, passion, and creativity making the game they wanted to make that took place in the Harry Potter universe. Just because Rowling will get some royalty checks from people purchasing it, Hogwarts Legacy is something you shouldn’t play, even though she gets royalty checks from practically everything else officially associated with her brand. People who haven’t been paying attention to the developing drama around the game or Rowling—of which there are millions—would just buy Hogwarts Legacy because they like Harry Potter and want to play the game associated with it. The game also happens to be made well enough to be well-received by the general public that it has been a financial success.
A reviewer of any piece of media, who works for a company that has a reputation to uphold, should do their best to push aside any opinions associated with an artist, especially of a political nature, if they’re going to review their art. Reviewers should be even more capable of doing so when analyzing a video game for which the artist in question has had minimal to no input on its development. Not to mention, a big-budget video game like Hogwarts Legacy involves the efforts of many different people who may not even agree with the IP-holder’s political views. That being said, even if Rowling was the creative director behind Hogwarts Legacy, I still believe the reviewer should be able to judge it on its own merits before writing it off.
I’m not saying you have to be objective, because I don’t think that’s possible. We all have our biases, and I often lay mine out to give a full picture in my reviews when I feel it’s beneficial to the reader. However, those biases should be towards the quality of the work being reviewed and what the work is trying to accomplish, not the person associated with it. Kevin Spacey has been accused of being a sexual predator, but does that mean you shouldn’t be able to understand or break down any of the films he’s been in? You as an individual consumer can choose to engage with it or not based on your beliefs, but it is the job and responsibility of someone who is supposed to be giving a professional opinion that could influence others to judge it honestly.
Now, let’s consider biases when reviewing the Kotaku article with this quote.
“I read the Harry Potter books around the time they came out, back when I was blissfully unaware that J.K. Rowling would one day become known as much for her transphobic ideology as she is for being the author of an outrageously popular series of children’s books. (I am trans, which makes her attitude about trans people particularly hard to overlook.) I was already older than the series’ target audience, but I liked them fine, and thought that they deserved to become new classics of children’s literature...At the same time, I’m not a die-hard fan, steeped in Potter lore. While I remember the broad strokes of the series’ narrative, I’ve forgotten most of the smaller details, so I’m not going to catch every reference and Easter egg. ”
The author provides their own biases towards Harry Potter, which is perfectly fine. A person who is a big fan of Harry Potter would likely have a more positive skew towards the game, while someone who didn’t read the books or watch the movies would likely be neutral about it before playing it. So, you as a reader would be able to factor in whether or not you think their opinion is helpful based on your own interests. If you read a review by someone who hated Harry Potter because they thought the books were dumb and the movies were bad, you might be skeptical of that author’s opinion towards a video game of the same property.
The Kotaku author also claims to be trans. This is NOT relevant to the video game review. This is a personal characteristic of the person that may affect their viewpoint but is ultimately irrelevant when considering the game’s subject or its quality. I’m sure the author would disagree with that statement, but I don’t think it’s necessary to tell every reader where I grew up, what my gender is, what my political affiliation is, how many books I read last year, how many lovers I’ve had, or that my favorite food is Mexican when reviewing a video game about teenage wizards in Scotland. The reason the author includes their identity is because they believe it is relevant to Rowling and her opinions, who (once again) was not or barely involved in the development of this game. The Kotaku author identifying as trans should not matter unless there is content in the game that is deliberately treating trans people differently. Even though Hogwarts Legacy takes place in the 1800s—a century that was unkind to trans and gay people—there is a trans character in the game who is treated quite well, respected in fact. Yet, that detail is clearly not enough to skew the reviewer’s preconceived opinion, which they bring up later, and so will I.
Holier Than Thou
Let’s get to my favorite part of the article. It’s relatively early in the dissertation, and it’s only a single paragraph, but I think it perfectly encapsulates the elevated sense of status people working at sites like Kotaku have towards their own readers and their competitors, as well as how oblivious they are to the consequences of their influence and actions.
“Also, lastly, this is not a review. Like a number of other outlets, we weren’t furnished with early code, in what I can only assume was an effort to ensure that early reactions to the game would be mostly positive. Of course, you may argue that it’s the role of publishers and publicists to cultivate good press for their games, but I wish they would see the value of the games crit ecosystem as not so much an extension of their own PR efforts to be gamed for positive buzz, but as a place that lifts up the medium of games as a whole by taking them seriously. Without the extra time that early code would have afforded me, I wasn’t able to finish the story or come close to fully exploring the world. Instead, I’ve spent around 15 hours with the game, enough to feel like I have a solid foundation upon which to base my impressions.”
There are a couple of key takeaways from this paragraph, the first being the point they make of it not being a review. What is it then? It’s an opinion piece that has descriptions of the gameplay and interface, as well as information surrounding the plot. That sounds like a review to me. You don’t have to finish a game or a movie in order to call some opinion-filled article a review. It may not be a good review, or a well-written one, but my understanding of a review is that it is simply a summation of one’s experience, accompanied by an overall opinion of it being somewhere between fantastic and terrible. According to Google, the top two definitions for the word “review” are as follows:
a formal assessment or examination of something with the possibility or intention of instituting change if necessary.
a critical appraisal of a book, play, movie, exhibition, etc., published in a newspaper or magazine.
The statement “this is not a review” is just a way for the author to get away with talking about why you shouldn’t buy Hogwarts Legacy, and sharing their personal opinions without giving it any sort of reputational stamp of calling it a “review.”
The next thing worth noting in the Kotaku article quote is the indignant irritation at not being provided a review code ahead of time. Game publishers often provide review codes to game websites so the “journalists” can review the game and publish their opinions leading up to the video game’s release. This is most often done with games that publishers are confident will review well, or with games in which they don’t think sales will be seriously impacted by a negative review, but might still help the traditional give-and-take relationship between publishers and websites. Instances in which review codes are not sent out mostly apply to games that publishers think will review poorly and that those negative reviews will hurt the games’ sales. Now, ask yourself this: Why would WB Games not want to send a review code for Hogwarts Legacy to a place like Kotaku? Is it because they thought the game wasn’t well-made? I doubt it.
The reason a review code wasn’t sent was probably because of the reason I listed before: sites like Kotaku have been negative about the game from the day it was announced. Why send a code to a website that is going to give it a negative review no matter what? They can let content creators’ opinions and general word of mouth spread the news. Turns out, that seemed to work just fine. Yet, this author doesn’t seem to understand why a code wasn’t shared. I would think a rational person would at least consider this possibility, rather than write what this individual did in the second sentence of this gem of a paragraph, which happens to be even funnier to me:
“Of course, you may argue that it’s the role of publishers and publicists to cultivate good press for their games, but I wish they would see the value of the games crit ecosystem as not so much an extension of their own PR efforts to be gamed for positive buzz, but as a place that lifts up the medium of games as a whole by taking them seriously.”
I laughed out loud when I read this because I just could not believe what they were saying. First of all, I WOULD NOT argue that it’s the role of publicists to cultivate good press for the games on behalf of the publishers. It’s the role of sites like Kotaku to use their access to gather the facts and report on them, whether or not they are positive press for the publisher. Publishers have their own public relation representatives whose job it is to generate positive press. We do not need game journalists if they’re going to do the exact same thing! It is both shocking and revealing that this is what a Kotaku writer believes this is the role of a game news website!
In addition to the absurdity of forgetting what it means to do any sort of journalism, the latter portion of the sentence is equally stupid. I interpret it to be saying, In order for the industry to be taken seriously as a whole, sites like Kotaku should be given special treatment. The narcissistic arrogance is stunning. They believe their opinion as a writer for a game-news website is so important that getting special access from publishers “lifts up the medium of games as a whole.” By giving Kotaku writers early access to games, you’re taking the industry more seriously! It’s preposterous to believe their opinion is more valuable than that of a YoutTuber or average player when you consider all the negative press and integrity-destroying, partisan-hack writing their platform has showcased over the past few years since before Hogwarts Legacy was even released. I and countless others would rather listen to a streamer who has demonstrated a level-headed approach to developing their opinions, or just someone with a small amount of authenticity to them, instead of reading the lamentations of a whiny writer for Kotaku who didn’t have more than fifteen hours to play a video game and form a reasonable and honest opinion of it when that is supposed to be their job.
There are numerous examples from old GiantBomb.com podcasts in which former members of the site recounted the days of getting a game to review late while working at Gamespot in the early 2000s. They would talk about having to play the game at work and then having to go home and play it some later into the night in order to complete it, only to then spend the following 24-48 hours writing and editing an article that would be demonstrable to their opinions in an honest matter because they needed to get a review out within the time frame they were given. Perhaps Kotaku doesn’t ask overtime of its authors, but my understanding of any type of real journalism is that it is a passion job that demands a lot of time and dedication, requiring you to burn the midnight oil when things aren’t convenient. Watch movies like Spotlight, or The Post, or even Zodiac and you’ll notice that journalists in those films are portrayed as dedicated individuals who are willing to put in the time for the task they have at hand, regardless of importance or convenience.
As a writer for Kotaku, you’re not covering big stories coming from Washington D.C., or London, or the Middle East. You’re covering video games and bitching that you didn’t get the convenience of early access to the game like you expected your position would afford. In addition, you’re using it as an excuse to only give a massive open-world game fifteen hours of your time before you fart out an opinion that was already overly biased from the start. Is it not the job of a writer at Kotaku to make time for a game and write a comprehensive review of it?
Click-Hate
If it isn’t already apparent, I’m no fan of Kotaku and I haven’t been for a long time for one reason or another, so you can consider that bias while skimming through this next section. I visit the site just to read their headlines because it’s rare that there is anything useful to read and similar sites don’t do any better. Most of the time, it’s stupid stuff like this that catches my attention and curiosity deems I have to see how dumb it’s going to get.
The biggest gripe I used to have before they lost their only good remaining reporter was just the click-bait nature of their articles. For years, the site must have been dependent on having two-sentence articles with an image or video to house their twenty advertisements per page to pay the bills. These days, they’ve shifted their efforts for clicks. Rather than just having worthless webpages with no content, Kotaku and their affiliated sites are much more dedicated to pointing fingers at people, and trying to shame any and all who don’t have the same beliefs of their staff with articles like the one I’m analyzing. As I’ve mentioned already, Hogwarts Legacy has brought out their hatred in full force. This article demonstrates how much their hatred for everyone they deem as “other” makes it impossible for them to remain impartial.
Just a few examples of what you find when you type ‘Hogwarts Legacy’ in the Kotaku search
As you get deeper and deeper into the article, you start to get to some of the hate-fueled ranting that further reveals the author’s intentions. It’s apparent how the author is digging for some dirt to throw on Hogwarts Legacy and yet they reveal more about themselves in the process. They even go so far as to suggest that the many teams who worked on the game have the wrong politics, or that they shouldn’t stick to certain established tropes of storytelling that encourage non-violence:
“There is little argument, it seems, about the fact that goblins are not treated as equals by wizards. This strikes me as inherently bad. One of the game’s main antagonists, a goblin named Ranrok, agrees with me. However, his problem is that he “goes too far,” resorting to violence in his pursuit of goblin liberation. This is such a common tactic for films and games to use. They create a villain who has reasonable objections to the shitty status quo, but they resort to violence in their efforts to change things, so that the heroes can then work to protect the shitty status quo under the guise of stopping that villain, we as viewers or players can feel good about it, and the problems with the status quo are never addressed...and while I don’t think violence is generally the way for oppressed groups to seek liberation, I also know that asking nicely definitely isn’t, that power concedes nothing without a demand.”
I love how the last part of that quote contradicts itself to summarize the author’s view on the conflict at the center of the game’s plot and how they tend to view the world as a whole. This person started the game with the desire to hate it. It didn’t matter if the game was good or if they had any fun with it. They were looking for any single spot in the experience onto which they could project their politics and preconceived judgments about J.K. Rowling and her franchise. And it doesn’t stop with this one quote.
“The way this mentality erases the systemic issue of how goblins are discriminated against by wizards makes me want to scream. If an individual cis person is nice to me, I’m not going to dismiss the reality that transphobia exists and create some work that speaks to “the good” between trans and cis people. No, I want cis people to do nothing less than collectively work to dismantle transphobia, just as I want white people to collectively be traitors to the social construct of whiteness and dismantle white supremacy, just as I want every group that benefits from an existing oppressive system to dismantle that system...But again, this is Rowling’s world, a world where protecting the status quo is noble, where a Black magical cop is called Kingsley Shacklebolt, where maybe one house elf every now and then can get her freedom as a treat, but where the real bad guys are the goblins or trans people demanding equality and liberation from those who oppress them with all the power of money and institutions and entrenched social prejudices behind them, resulting in those oppressors needing to be defended.”
When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. I won’t go so far as to accuse them of being something like an admirer of the Bolshevik Revolution without any citations or evidence, but that’s because, unlike the staff of Kotaku, I know what “libel” and “defamation” mean, which we’ll get to in a moment. The last thing I want to point out in this section is where the hatred of the author ultimately leads with a quote from the last few paragraphs of the Kotaku article:
“I knew that Hogwarts Legacy was going to be a hit. I knew it would sell bajillions of copies, that people who claim to be committed to the cause of trans rights would still gladly buy their $70 ticket to the virtual amusement park that J.K. Rowling built, all while muttering their mealy-mouthed excuses about how there’s “no ethical consumption under capitalism.” Yes, the game has a trans woman in it who you can’t miss. Yes, your character can defy gender norms. Here’s my position on that: It doesn’t matter....Hogwarts, and the whole wizarding world, are both the tools and the house of J.K. Rowling. They have made her unfathomably wealthy.”
This author, like many other vocal individuals who claim to hate J.K. Rowling, is essentially saying: it doesn’t matter how inclusive the game might be, or any concessions the developers made to appease the angry mob of hatred, or even if there are positive messages to take away from Hogwarts Legacy; it’s still giving money to J.K. Rowling and that’s bad enough to make you a bad person if you buy it. In addition, they try to deflate the counterargument about how there are countless other things we as consumers buy that might be tied to people we find unsavory with the term “mealy-mouthed.” I’m sorry, there’s nothing mealy-mouthed about the fact that in our modern, global economy, there are plenty of goods and services that we rely on which may happen to come from distasteful people or companies. PG&E is the primary energy provider for a significant part of the U.S. West Coast, but they can also be held responsible for some of the worst fires that California has ever seen, costing many people their lives and billions of dollars in damages. Amazon, Target, and Walmart provide extremely convenient options for products at prices that less fortunate people can afford while also being notoriously terrible to their employees.
I’m not trying to argue for or against capitalism, here. I’m just saying that I at least have an understanding that if you are buying anything from anyone else, there’s a decent chance your money might eventually end up in the pocket of someone you don’t like. Consider the Lifehacker article with alternatives to Hogwarts Legacy that Kotaku featured. It listed games from other game publishers like Bethesda and Electronic Arts, which have had their share of controversies over the years. Consider also any instances in which Kotaku or its affiliates provided positive coverage to games published by companies like Activision or Ubisoft, which have had multiple reliable claims filed against them and their executives for sexual abuse and misconduct in the workplace. There are even claims of misconduct at Nintendo, which has a game mentioned in the Lifehacker article as well.
This person is throwing stones in a glass house in their attempts to shame anyone who would have the audacity to purchase Hogwarts Legacy. If you don’t want to give your money to the developers who made the game, or to the publisher WB Games (which also has a game listed in that Lifehacker article), or to J.K. Rowling, that is your choice as an individual. But don’t shame people from your pretentious soapbox, just because you have opinions that you think make you morally superior to anyone who just wants to play the Harry Potter video game.
Journalistic Malpractice
Perhaps I should have put this section at the top because it’s really the most important issue as a whole, but I really wanted to get through the other more comical bits before I touched on perhaps the biggest transgression of this article and the many other gripes I have highlighted from Kotaku. If you cannot stand Kotaku, their viewpoints, or the quality of their writer’s work, and you do not want to read the whole article, I don’t blame you. But you don’t have to read more than two sentences to see what I’m talking about in black and white. The second sentence of their “not-review,” reads as follows:
“The conversation around the open-world action adventure game which seeks to provide players with the immersive fantasy of actually attending the storied school of magic from the Harry Potter universe, largely stems from the fact that the universe’s creator, J.K. Rowling, is a virulent transphobe, using the platform afforded her by her fame and wealth to normalize the othering of trans people and contributing prominently to a culture in which anti-trans sentiment, legislation, and violence, are on the rise.”
Take note of two words in that sentence: Fact & Is. Now, consider how there is no appearance of words like “allegedly,” or “accused,” or anything that protects Kotaku from libel suits. I’m not a journalist, but I know that you do not want to say something negative or potentially untrue about a public figure without mentioning that you are working off of conjecture at the very least. You certainly do not want to make declarative statements like this without providing at least some citations and evidence. There is not a single cross-referential link in this sentence that says “anti-trans sentiment, legislation, and violence are on the rise.” What legislation? What violence? Show me examples of what you are talking about! In this article, the only external links they provide are a YouTube video showing gameplay and a Vice article about people getting tattoos removed; the rest are all Kotaku articles. They even say this toward the end of their rant:
“I won’t link to it here, but as I write this, just yesterday The New York Times published an opinion piece titled “In Defense of J.K. Rowling,” just a few days after a 16-year-old trans girl was murdered in Rowling’s native UK. Maybe the transphobic billionaire isn’t the one who needs defending.”
They don’t want to link to the opinion piece, because they obviously don’t want to give clicks to an alternative viewpoint. However, they also don’t link to the story about the murder they're referencing. At the very least, some previous articles featured on Kotaku had links to Rowling’s tweets and things she’s written, even though I would argue the citations they provided were still not sufficient evidence for their accusations. I guess they think that when enough people say it on Twitter, it must be true. If you’re going to say that it is a “FACT that J.K. Rowling IS a virulent transphobe,” in the same way that it is a fact that water is wet, you should provide citations or links to evidence to support this claim. Making declarative accusations about a person without evidence in your “not-review” about a video game is unprofessional.
For example, I can say that, based on the fact that I write more than a dozen articles on this site a year in my spare time, it is my opinion that the Kotaku Managing Editor should probably have been able to spend more time with the game without a review code when you consider how there appear to be less than 20 articles written by them in the past year. And I can make that statement because I’ll include a screenshot to back up my argument.
Unlike the Managing Editor of Kotaku, I’m willing to put quotes and external links on my article to sites other than my own to back up my argument, my opinion, and my assumptions about an individual. My key assumption is that this person is bad at their job. They don’t know that, even though a past article linked to something J.K Rowling said exists somewhere on the website, they still need to provide links again when making accusations. They can’t accommodate more than fifteen hours of their time between watching episodes of The Last of Us (see image) to review a video game when they work for a video game website. And as they’re quote suggested in regards to the role of publicist vs publisher, they don’t even know what their job really is.
Closing Thoughts
In 2018, when IGN had to handle some controversy involving one of their writers plagiarizing online reviews from a YouTuber, Dan Ryckert of GiantBomb.com responded to the situation with a fair amount of anger and disgust in an episode of the podcast he was on (Giant BeastCast ep 169). During his response, he mentions how much of a sought-after position it was to work for a video game website for people who are passionate about games, and how much it upset him that someone with such low standards would be able to achieve a coveted job like that. I’m certainly not accusing the author of this Kotaku article of plagiarism, but I think Ryckert’s opinion of what the job is supposed to be is relevant to what I’ve said today.
It used to be a dream job for a lot of people like myself, but that job has changed, lost its integrity, and become a joke. The standards of what the position required seem to be completely gone and there is nothing anyone on a site like Kotaku can say that I can take seriously. I find myself, similarly to Ryckert, disgusted that such low standards are allowed to permeate the space simply because they happen to fit into an accepted ideology.
In some ways, you can consider the IGN controversy from five years ago as a turning point or yet another nail in the coffin that was built by GamerGate. Public trust in these institutions had already been falling away by then, but this was when it started to really become clear. You could trust the independent content creators more than the “journalists” of these established websites, so much that these established writers were stealing from independents.
Kotaku and many other sites like it don’t deserve to continue because they’re filled with people who don’t actually care about the games they’re supposed to be covering. They don’t even seem to understand what their job really is. They think they deserve more respect and hand-outs just because of the position they’re in. They would rather shout their political beliefs and call for a dismantlement of “the system” in their opinion piece about a Harry Potter video game than discuss the merits of the experience on its own or, you know, review the game. And wouldn’t you know it, despite their best efforts to get everyone else to hate Hogwarts Legacy, there were more than 12 million people out there who didn’t give a damn about what they had to say. I’d say I’m one of them, but then I obviously cared enough to respond to this garbage article, in addition to buying the game. Get bent, Kotaku.
