Kotaku Australia Has Folded
My heart! Oh, my poor wounded heart! Kotaku Down Under is no more! Won’t someone please think of the children?
If I was a better person, I’d be trying to come up with some kind of emotion tangential to empathy. After all, Kotaku wasn’t always this steaming, radioactive pile. When it first launched this was its mascot, which tells you just about everything it used to be.
Brian Crecente was brought in a month after Kotaku launched in 2006 and turned it into something that was almost always worth visiting on the daily. Like G4 tv it was part and parcel of 2000s nerd culture.
Back then it wasn’t remotely interested in breaking news. It was much more about gaming reviews and gaming culture. It was where you went to get news from E3 back when there was a reason to care about that. There were interviews with legends like John Romero. Or oddball articles like John Carmack And The Hideo Kojima Sunset. Cult movies were well represented along with some of the oddities of Japanese culture.
That was along with weirdness like the Snacktaku where you could find out what a Chicken Smoothie tasted like, alongside fast food reviews.
Kotaku in those days was something kind of special. Tragically, so was its parent company, Gawker Media. They let the nerds do what they wanted until 2011 when Crecente was invited to commit corporate seppuku and suck started to move in. It was happening all over the internet back then. Cracked went from a humor site with articles like 5 Bizarre Implications of the Gremlins Films to Top 5 Ways to Talk Your Bigoted Rural Hick Relatives at Christmas.
Venture capital had decided there was money to be made in blog advertising for some retarded reason and started dumping insane amounts of money into them. This attracted useless but well-connected mouths to feed. The Woke set in fast and the click-bair turned into rage-bait. Kotaku, once a site by and for gamers became a site known for its loathing and hatred of gamers. Smug writers with six-figure salaries sneered at the audience that had made Kotaku a one-stop nerd shop, despite the fact that their company made absolutely no money.
The amazing part was just how long this profit-free business model was able to last. Basically, it was a shell game where one set of venture capitalists would figure out they had a turd on their hands, polish it up bright and shiny, then sell it off to the next set of hapless VCs
The problem with a Hot Potato business model is that someone is always left holding it when the music stops. And the music has stopped. What profits there were relied on ads and Google and Facebook divided that market up between them.
Today Kotaku is known as a shill site for Sweet Baby Inc., DEI gaming, and GamerGate hatred. Its EIC is literally a failed sex work, Australia Kotaku’s shuttering today sent her in fresh paroxysms of psychotic hyper-rage. Crazy as she is, she knows the end is here.
Don’t mourn for Kotaku. It’s already dead.
