Tag: Geoff Keighley

Video Games Weekly: Silksong and Gamescom
Welcome to Video Games Weekly on Engadget. Expect a new story every Monday or Tuesday (or Wednesday, whatever), broken into two parts. The first is a space for short essays and ramblings about video game trends and related topics from me, Jess Conditt, a reporter who’s covered the industry for more than 13 years. The second contains the video game stories from the past week that you need to know about, including some headlines from outside of Engadget.

Please enjoy — and I’ll see you next week.

On a planet shrouded in myth, in a land surrounded by lore, on a mountain draped in mystery, in a cave suffocated by secrets, the legend sleeps. For six years, the legend has slumbered while wild stories spiral around it, twisting and expanding and entwining. New words have been born and old words infused with evolved meanings: Believer. Doubter. Silkpost. The lies have grown so thick they’ve become corporeal, spreading trickery with a name and a dead smile.

For six years, the legend has slept while the masses roiled, all of them waiting for the signal to awaken and know truth. All of them waiting for a bell that will ring, finally and clearly, on Thursday, August 21, 2025.

Skong. Skong. Skong.

It’s a special time in the Silksong subreddit. After years of silence around its sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Team Cherry has scheduled a livestream with a “special announcement” about the game for August 21 at 10:30AM ET. Not only is this exciting for Metroidvania fans everywhere, but it’s also possible that this announcement marks the final moments of the Silksong subreddit as we know it. A strange cocktail of game delays, inconsistent updates and hyper-focused cult fandom has cultivated a fascinating little universe in r/Silksong, complete with its own rules, villains and heroes. It’s a place where clown wigs are commonplace and contributors have turned trolling into a role-playing artform. A LARPform, if you will. It’s a place that’s consistently made me laugh every time it’s appeared in my feed over the past year or so.

Ahead of Thursday’s special announcement, this sub is experiencing the last gasps of desperate myth-making and hopeless anticipation before it transforms into something else entirely, armed with actual information about the sequel, gameplay videos and maybe even a firm release date. Or, dare I say it, a surprise launch. For just a moment longer in r/Silksong, anything is possible.

And then it’ll be over. No matter what happens during Thursday’s livestream, the day will come when Silksong comes out and the drip-feed of silkposts dries up completely. But for now, our face paint is ready. Sometimes it’s just nice to recognize the madness and the beauty of the moment, before it slips away for good.

The news

News from ONL 2025

Gamescom 2025 kicked off on Tuesday with Opening Night Live, a showcase hosted by Geoff Keighley and the folks behind The Game Awards, and there were plenty of delightful morsels on display. Engadget UK Bureau Chief Mat Smith is on the ground at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, to play upcoming titles and talk to developers, but for now, here are our headlines straight out of ONL 2025:

And our headlines from Gamescom 2025 so far:

Gamescom 2025 runs through August 24.

ROG Xbox Ally lands in October

Microsoft is slowly establishing its handheld era with news that the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X will be available on October 16. There’s still no official word on how much they’ll cost, but there are hints: As spotted by Wario64, Best Buy recently listed the Xbox Ally at $550 and the Xbox Ally X at $900, and these fall in line with our predictions, which were based on the prices of existing ROG Ally handhelds. Alongside the release date, Microsoft announced the Handheld Compatibility Program, an initiative aimed at optimizing games for portable devices and informing players about how well they perform. It’s essentially Steam Deck Verified, but for Xbox handhelds, and it’s yet another sign that Microsoft’s portable gaming ambitions stretch beyond just one hardware manufacturer.

The PS5 will cost more tomorrow than it does today

First Nintendo and Microsoft raised the prices of their latest consoles, and now it’s Sony’s turn. Sony on Wednesday announced the following price increases for the PS5 family:
- Standard PS5 with a disc drive: $550, up from $500
- PS5 digital edition: $500, up from $450
- PS5 Pro: $750, up from $700
Sony blames the increases on a “challenging economic environment,” echoing sentiments from its contemporaries. The price hikes come at a time in the hardware generation when we’re used to seeing consoles get cheaper, which just makes this whole thing more frustrating.

Rod Fergusson is in charge of BioShock again and already making big changes

There have been signs of turmoil at BioShock 4 studio Cloud Chamber for a while now, including news earlier this month that the game failed a review with 2K executives and was due for a complete narrative revamp. Now, we’re seeing even more fallout. Former Gears of War and Diablo head Rod Fergusson has left Blizzard to lead development of BioShock 4 at Cloud Chamber, and his appointment comes alongside news that 80 people at the studio are being laid off. This is actually the second time Fergusson has joined the development of a BioShock game at the last second — he similarly swooped in and cut aspects of BioShock: Infinite at Irrational Games in 2012.

The race through development hell between Judas and BioShock 4 continues.

Blizzard’s cinematic and narrative team is unionizing

Microsoft is the home of another video game union. Workers with Blizzard Entertainment’s Story and Franchise Development team, which handles in-game cinematics and lore for titles including Overwatch and World of Warcraft, voted this week to unionize under the Communications Workers of America. This covers about 169 developers and it marks the fourth unionization effort from Microsoft’s gaming teams, joining QA workers at Activision, ZeniMax and Raven Software.

Steam censorship is breaking PayPal

PayPal isn’t a valid way to buy games on Steam in certain countries any longer. Steam in July removed hundreds of games with adult and NSFW themes from its storefront, and updated its policies to ban “content that may violate the rules and standards” of its payment processors. This was incredibly vague and raised immediate concerns around financial censorship, especially when combined with a related culling of thousands of games from Itch.io. Now, it’s confirmed that PayPal has terminated its partnership with Steam in multiple countries, affecting any denomination “other than EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD and USD.”

Valve says it’s being pressured by payment processors including Visa, MasterCard and PayPal to remove certain games and implement puritanical censorship policies, and this has already resulted in at least one game being unjustly removed from the platform. That game, VILE: Exhumed, is now available as shareware.

Roblox is changing its rules after so, so many child-safety lawsuits

Roblox is locking down its system for sharing and viewing user-generated games following a wave of lawsuits accusing developers of failing to protect their young userbase. All unrated experiences, or user-created games, will be restricted to the developer and anyone actively working on them, rather than being available to anyone over the age of 13, as is currently the case. This change and others, including a new system that automatically detects and tracks “violative scenes” on individual servers, will roll out over the coming months.

Analogue delayed its N64 remake again

It’s now due out in Q4 2025. 🙁

Additional reading
- Kris Holt’s indie game roundup
- More action than RPG, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 struggles to convince after a few hours’ play by Robert Purchese at Eurogamer
Jessica Conditt

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August 20, 2025
This Was The Best Xbox Showcase In Years (And The Hardest To Root For)

A Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 campaign that looks like Mission: Impossible by way of an Adam Curtis documentary, a Gears of War prequel that shows fans E-Day and the birth of the series’ iconic “Lancer” chainsaw gun, and a trailer that showed Perfect Dark isn’t just still alive, it’s potentially thriving. Microsoft’s 2024 summer showcase was the best that Xbox has looked going back to the Xbox One years. But it’s come at a huge price, and one the company doesn’t seem ready to acknowledge publicly.

Thank You, PS Plus, For Making My Backlog Even Bigger

Insiders had been hyping the showcase for days, in part due to the fact that its full list of reveals and announcements had already leaked to some in the media and beyond. Fans have been burned before, expecting Xbox to finally turn a corner only to have the football pulled once again and realize the platform is still in another one of its inescapable “rebuilding” years. The proof is always in the games themselves, and how successful they are can only really be determined once they get into players’ hands. For now, though, the showcase delivered.

There was over sixty minutes of games big and small, offering everything from zombie survival to nostalgic teen hangout, punctuated by massive first-party franchises and third-party teases. If you own an Xbox Series X/S there will be plenty to play this year and next. Xbox game studios head Matt Booty’s perennial promise for a steady cadence of quarterly Xbox games worth showing up for might finally come true. The only thing missing from the event was any accountability for what, and who, Microsoft has sacrificed to get here.

It’s been just over a month since the company announced it’s shutting down three studios and reshuffling a fourth. One of the casualties, Tango Gameworks, and its 2023 hit Hi-Fi Rush, seemed to symbolize the best of Xbox in the Game Pass era: a hyper-stylized passion project from a newer team that wowed critics and won awards and wouldn’t have been possible without the “let a thousand flowers bloom” strategy behind the platform’s pivot to a Netflix-like subscription library. In a crushing reversal, however, the deep-pocketed tech giant cut the team, along with storied immersive sim makers Arkane Austin and others. According to internal comments from Booty and the head of parent company Zenimax, there just wasn’t enough bandwidth for one of the three most valuable companies in the world to manage so many studios.

The bad news and bullshit explanation might not have gone down like a lead balloon if Microsoft hadn’t announced mass layoffs just months earlier across several departments, including newly acquired Activision Blizzard. The cuts hit everyone from the Overwatch 2 team to Call of Duty makers Sledgehammer Games, and included the cancellation of Odyssey, a survival crafting fantasy game that might have become the first new franchise from Blizzard in nearly a decade. Microsoft spent $69 billion on the acquisition, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer toured the Activision Blizzard King offices shortly after the deal was finalized last fall, and then in early 2024 the mask came off.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer blamed the heel turn on a combination of investor pressure and the stagnation of the console gaming market in interviews with Game File and Polygon. In other words: capitalism. But the complete closure of Tango Gameworks, originally founded by Resident Evil director Shinji Mikami to train a new generation of creatives, seemed especially capricious. The Xbox team didn’t mention the developers it’s laid off and their contributions in its remarks to a live audience ahead of the showcase today, or during the pre-recorded event itself. (Even after learning its fate, Arkane Austin worked hard to push out Redfall’s much-needed final update.)

Instead, Spencer opened the showcase by promoting Black Ops 6 and the company’s desire to bring one of the most popular franchises to even more players through the power of a $17-a-month subscription. It maybe wasn’t surprising given the billions Microsoft paid to acquire the series, but the choice to open the show this way underscored the new reality of an Xbox brand that now needs to make a return worthy of all of those investments. “I haven’t been talking publicly about this, because right now is the time for us to focus on the team and the individuals,” Spencer told IGN later in the day, away from the hundreds of thousands of fans tunning into the showcase.

He continued:

It’s obviously a decision that’s very hard on them, and I want to make sure through severance and other things that we’re doing the right thing for the individuals on the team. It’s not about my PR, it’s not about Xbox PR. It’s about those teams. In the end, I’ve said over and over, I have to run a sustainable business inside the company and grow, and that means sometimes I have to make hard decisions that frankly are not decisions I love, but decisions that somebody needs to go make.

The showcase, meanwhile, didn’t even clear the bar set days prior by Geoff Keighley at the Game Awards host’s own showcase. Xbox president Sarah Bond, who responded with corpo word salad when asked about studio closures last month, closed out the Xbox showcase by pointing to the future instead of dwelling on the recent past. “It’s our mission to make Xbox the best place to play, by including our own studios’ games on Game Pass at launch, by bringing your games into the future with our commitment to game preservation, by pushing the boundaries in our future hardware, and to empower you to play your games wherever you want on Xbox console, PC, and cloud,” she said. “This is what defines Xbox today and in the future, and we’re hard at work on the next generation.”

It was a commitment aimed at reassuring fans still recovering from the shock of the brand’s recent pivots. But the future is built on the past, and every shiny new Xbox game now comes with the question of what will happen to the teams Microsoft has purchased or partnered with, once it no longer feels like they serve its bottom line.

Update 6/9/2024 9:10 p.m. ET: Added comments from Spencer’s post-show interview with IGN.

Ethan Gach

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June 9, 2024
Summer Game Fest Plans, Hades 2 Tips, And More

Photo: The Game Awards / Summer Game Fest / Kotaku (Getty Images), Image: Bungie / Sony, Supergiant Games, Screenshot: Ninja Theory / Claire Jackson / Kotaku

It’s summer, but just because it’s nice out doesn’t mean we stop playing games. It’s almost time for Not-E3/Summer Game Fest, and several major studios are planning showcases and reveals during the upcoming week. We break down what you can expect.

We also help you beat the final boss in Hades 2, and find all of the totems, or lorestangir, in Hellblade 2. You’re welcome.

Kotaku Staff

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June 1, 2024
Game Dev Succinctly Answers What the Games Industry Owes Palestinians

Younès Rabii and dozens of The Game Awards’ Future Class signed an open letter that, among other things, asked TGA to call for a long-term ceasefire in Gaza. In solidarity, AI researcher and game designer Mike Cook explained what’s wrong with the assertion that spaces like TGA should stay out of it and just “stick with games.”

While the idea of “getting political” at an awards show is a divisive topic, it’s not new to TGA. Just last year, TGA tweeted (some now deleted) acknowledgements on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and supported fundraising efforts. Gaming companies took symbolic stands, too, like EA removing Russian cosmetics from FIFA.

In 2021, amid back-to-back mass sexual harassment and labor abuse suits from companies like Activision Blizzard, TGA founder/host/producer Geoff Keighley (with support of Activision) pulled them from everything but nominations and offered a statement we’d later come to realize was probably an empty platitude.

So, in late November, members of TGA’s Future Class—a group of gaming industry professionals TGA highlights every year to “represent the bright, bold and inclusive future of video games”—published an open letter asking for three key things from the ceremony: investments against the dehumanization of South-West Asian and North African people in the gaming space, expression of support of Palestinian life, and a call for a long-term ceasefire in Gaza.

Open letter to The Game Awards

The games industry’s silence on the Palestinian genocide is disgusting, and this needs to change.

To all gamedevs: Please read our letter to The Game Awards, sign it, and share it as much as you can. Palestinians need all the support we can give ✊???

?https://t.co/SpG5vOfd9z pic.twitter.com/BbtJiS4EKT

— ?? Younès?TGA (@pyrofoux) November 24, 2023

I don’t often publicly talk about being a member of the Game Awards Future Class, but any nods towards diversity and inclusion are meaningless if we can’t even acknowledge the ongoing genocide of Palestinians https://t.co/rowEXCsBhn

— Florence Smith Nicholls (@florencesn) November 13, 2023

Despite the past statements from TGA, Geoff Keighley and others stayed silent this year. I don’t mean that figuratively, like how he ignored the industry labor protest outside the theater. Leaked images show that when Keighley was directly confronted with his failure to respond in the Future Class Discord, he literally replied with a silent two-second voice reply before he deleted it.

While 83 past and current members of the Future Class signed this letter, others didn’t. Among many things, developer Amiad Fredman criticized the letter’s lack of Hamas condemnation. Also, despite widespread acknowledgement from scholars of genocide in and outside of Israel, he questioned the use of the word “genocide.” According to Axios, Rabii said in response, “There was a strong idea that advocating for Palestinian human rights immediately meant supporting the taking of hostages in Israel, the civilian lives being lost in Israel. That’s not the case, of course.”

Growing frustrated by the people pushing back against a call for action from the TGA, Cook took to their blog. Three days before the awards began, Cook published Mostly Harmless to address the sentiments of people sympathetic enough to see the genocide but who feel it needs to stay separate from gaming.

Answering: Why would the games industry need to say anything about Palestine?

Cook begins by pointing to the relationship between the gaming and weapons manufacturing industries. They cite an in-depth look from a 2012 Eurogamer piece to show how far back this criticism stretches. That article mentions how, during the Sandy Hook school shooting trial, documents revealed Remington paid Call of Duty to include their gun models in the game for brand recognition.

Then, Cook moved to a much more widespread and pervasive issue. The gaming industry maintains close ties with many of the militaries involved in the murder and suffering of Palestinians. For Palestinians living as second-class citizens in Israel, Microsoft provides apartheid-maintaining surveillance tech to Israel. Jewish and Arab tech workers have been ousted for speaking up against this. Additionally, the U.S. Army advertises on Twitch (directly and with influencers) and sponsors eSports activities.

The US military uses games as a recruitment tool in just about every conceivable way, no matter how bizarre, but it also uses it as a propaganda tool.

Cook

Reaching a 10-player killstreak in COD: Modern Warfare (2019) earns players a white phosphorus perk. The chemical weapon’s use in conflict is a war crime. Despite this, Israel reportedly released American-made white phosphorus onto Gaza and Lebanon. In COD: MW II (2022) you have to point your gun at someone to complete the objective of “de-escalat[ing] civilians.”

I’m not trying to pick on COD, because it’s not just them. Other FPS games, thrive on modes where players confront terrorists, free hostages, and defuse bombs. (Often, these terrorist have vaguely Latin American, African, Arab, or Eastern European accents.) COD just includes the most egregious examples of propaganda.

In the second half, Cook stresses that games aid in the dehumanization of Black and brown people by entertainment. They don’t even get into the Islamophobic voice chats rampant in games. Cook zeroes in on narrative gaming where “accented” brown people rarely appear as anything other than villains’ or “one of the good ones” aiding the protagonist.

Pulling from POC criticism for years, Cook points to entertainment showing Muslims as “villainous, barbaric, backwards or helpless” for decades. Kotaku Senior Editor Alyssa Mercante discussed this in a recent interview with Rabii, Rami Ismail, Tamoor Hussain, and Nadia Shammas.

Meanwhile, games with bigotry allegories common to racialized people are a dime a dozen. This colors games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Detroit: Become Human. Even TGA Game of the Year Baldur’s Gate 3 is backdropped against a Tiefling refugee crisis. One of the biggest games in years, The Last of Us (series), took heavy inspiration from the conflict Israel and Palestine. Creator Neil Druckmann spent his early childhood on an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank (Palestine), and his centrist approach reflects in the work—a work that was present at the awards as Druckmann took to the TGA stage to accept the statue for Best Adapted Work.

Another failure of The Game Awards

In 25 years, The Game Awards will celebrate the ‘bravery’ and ‘importance’ of a game retelling the Palestinian genocide but it will not say a word until speaking out will be absolutely meaningless.

What is the meaning of handing out Diversity and Inclusion awards to dead people? https://t.co/68SqQzQzG0

— ?? Younès?TGA (@pyrofoux) November 14, 2023

Cook ends with this thesis: The cultural capital of the gaming industry has real influence on the world. While Cook’s blog is about Palestine, this could easily be extended to other regions facing equally dire conditions—places like the Congo, where the mineral used to power our phones and electronics, cobalt, is fought for.

As of writing, the letter has over 3,071 total signatures and now includes mine. The signatories range from storyboarding artists and game testers to game design professors and journalists. Peaking at 3.6 million current viewers, TGA had an incredible opportunity to exert that influence in a positive way. This isn’t projecting American values, either, because most countries represented at the awards are also voting for a ceasefire.

With the current state of the game industry, silence is a message.

Silence is tacit support.

Silence is dehumanization of Palestinian lives.

Open letter to The Game Awards

Thirsty Suitors‘ designer Meghna Jayanth tried to use this for good at the Golden Joysticks Awards before they ultimately canceled her appearance. This censoring is, in part, what moved Rabii and most of the other members of a class—part of TGA’s diversity and inclusion efforts—to ask better of TGA, so that TGA could be the voice of gaming worldwide, rather than just of America and American companies. After all, the hesitation or condemnation of calling for a ceasefire is almost entirely an American/British affair.

BREAKING: The US just vetoed the UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

The US was the only vote against. The UK abstained.

Our government is actively enabling & supporting the Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.

— IfNotNow?? (@IfNotNowOrg) December 8, 2023

(featured image: Golden Joystick Awards, The Game Awards, Activision/Blizzard, and Valve)

Have a tip we should know? [email protected]

Alyssa Shotwell

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December 15, 2023
If The Game Awards Is All About The Devs, Then Let Them Speak

At the opening of last night’s 2023 edition of The Game Awards, host Geoff Keighley hyped the event as an evening “to recognize outstanding creative work in games in 2023.” But as the night went on, the luminaries who were being awarded for their “outstanding creative work” seemed like they weren’t given much time to actually speak about said work.

The Top 10 Most-Played Games On Steam Deck: October 2023 Edition

Read More: Everything We Saw At The Game Awards 2023

The Game Awards is held at the end of every year, ostensibly to celebrate and award the labor that goes into the video games we spend countless hours enjoying. As at most awards shows, it’s customary for winners to give a bit of a speech, thanking those who helped make their game, and thus the award, possible. But this year it felt like time was cut short for most developers. Some have speculated that The Game Awards was worried someone might mention the serious labor issues facing the industry, or yet scarier, the current conflict in Gaza, thus inviting that most dreaded of phenomena: controversy. Whatever the reason, it was a night that always felt too out of time for the people it was ostensibly supposed to be about.

Read More: We Have To Talk (Again) About How War Games Depict The Middle East

Throughout the night, orchestral music floated in very soon after most award winners began speaking. That might be a good policy for keeping such a stacked event moving, but when you consider just how much time was devoted to celebrities, muppets, and conversations with high-profile developers like Hideo Kojima (who Aftermath estimates gobbled up as much time as 13.5 of the night’s truncated winner speeches would have), it’s not hard to feel like The Game Awards failed to prioritize its time well. And many awards, probably most, went without anyone coming up on stage at all, getting just quick, cursory-feeling readouts of the winners from Keighley or his cohost before it was time to cut to another ad break, announce a new game, or invite a celebrity onstage.

After a year of constant, highly public layoffs across the industry, ushering developers offstage while granting celebrities all the time they could ask for feels uniquely out of step. Running large events relying on commercial support is no easy task, but surely there must be a better way to schedule things out so that, in Keighley’s own words, we can actually “recognize outstanding creative work.”

Read More: Here Are All Of The 2023 Game Award Winners (And Losers)

Attendees report a large, ominous teleprompter message reading “Please Wrap It Up,”” which as Javier Cordero pointed out on Twitter (presently known as “X”), was even on display while people from Larian Studios tried to talk about what developing the game meant to them while they accepted the most prestigious award of the night: Game of the Year.

The speech of Larian’s Swen Vincke brought tears to the eyes of his team members in the audience. He talked about what Baldur’s Gate 3 meant to the team, how it was the team’s pandemic project and how they lost Jim Southworth, lead cinematic artist on Baldur’s Gate 3, to cancer just last month. This was easily one of the most human moments in the nearly four-hour onslaught of non-stop commercialism, but hey, Please Wrap It Up, right?

Another odd moment came when CD Projekt Red took home the award for Best Ongoing Game. After being introduced by actor Anthony Mackie, who spent a chunk of time bantering with the audience (to everyone’s confusion) and plugging season two of Twisted Metal on Peacock. But when Gabriel Amatangelo and Paweł Sasko actually got on stage to collect their award, they were given scant time before the music started up.

This morning, Geoff Keighley himself recognized that, “while no one was cut off,” the music indeed felt like it came in too quickly.

But, as Axios’ Stephen Totilo shared, it’s not like the “wrap it up music” was automated. “I can confirm” he wrote on Twitter, “there was manual control of when to start the 30-second countdown to the ‘please wrap it up’ sign, manual control of when to make it flash. Was tweakable.”

Celebrities are entertaining and ads do pay the bills necessary to keep a show running, but hopefully future Game Awards shows will allocate developers as much time as Gonzo the muppet was given to talk about the work they and their teams put in to earn their recognition. Give folks time to enjoy their deserved moment in the spotlight, or else let’s just call The Game Awards what it is: Winter E3.

Claire Jackson

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December 8, 2023
The Best Part Of The Game Awards This Year Was The Fashion

Screenshot: The Game Awards

Last year, I caused a bit of a ruckus by saying the fashion at The Game Awards was indicative of the industry’s identity crisis. I lamented the t-shirt and blazer uniform and begged the men of the industry to do better. And though I said this not long before the 2022 awards show was set to kick off, it was clear that even in those few days, gaming’s biggest names scrambled to make sure they pleased one relatively unknown woman from New York.

Ahead of this year’s awards, I offered unsolicited fashion advice to try and ensure the awards ceremony felt as glitzy and as glamorous as host Geoff Keighley wants it to be. I even dressed a few of the attendees myself. But despite all that, I wasn’t sure what kind of looks we’d see when The Game Awards 2023 livestream kicked off on December 7.

This year, I attended the awards in-person, and had quite a few people tell me face-to-face that I singlehandedly made the attendees step up their fashion game. There was so much style both on and off the stage at the Peacock Theater last night, with dozens of people donning sequins and sparkles and Barbie-pink gowns and bright suit sets and funky accessories and sky-high heels. It truly was a feast for the eyes. Hell, Geoff dressed so well this year that someone dropped an f-bomb on stage over it.

So, I decided, just like last year, to gather some of the best-dressed attendees of The Game Awards 2023. Some of them were on-stage, many were off, all were fabulous. Click through to see who made the cut. You’re all beautiful.

Alyssa Mercante

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December 8, 2023
The Week's Biggest Gaming News, From The Fallout TV Show To The Game Awards

Amouranth bought an orchard for a cool $17 mill, Bethesda’s attempting to win the hearts and minds of disaffected Starfield players on Steam, and Dan Houser is back! In podcast form!

Diablo IV – Bear Bender Build

Here’s your cheat sheet for the week’s most important stories in gaming.

Bethesda Confirms Fallout TV Show Is Canon In First Official Preview

Screenshot: Amazon / Vanity Fair / Bethesda

In a newly released preview of Amazon Prime’s upcoming Fallout TV show, we learned a lot of new details about the world, characters, and story of the highly anticipated live-action adaptation of Bethesda’s popular post-apocalyptic RPG franchise. For example, the show is considered canon with the games. And Walter Goggins still looks good, even as an undead ghoul. Read More

TGA’s Geoff Keighley Weighs In On Dave The Diver Nomination Controversy

Image: Mintrocket

An intense debate ignited November 13, when The Game Awards host Geoff Keighley announced the nominees for this year’s trophy ceremony. While some folks were surprised Pikachu face by Starfield’s absence, most people were shook by one particular title offered up for the “Best Independent Game” category. Now, after a couple weeks of silence, Keighley has tossed his two cents into the discourse. Read More

Sonic 3 Movie Teaser Sparks Fan Freak-Out About Shadow’s Shoes

Image: Paramount / Sonic Wiki

Reader, if you don’t mind a quick look into my personal neurosis, let me tell you that when I’m really looking forward to something, I get a great deal of anxiety about possibly dying before I get to experience it. I’ve felt this about video games, movies, albums, concerts, and pretty much anything else worth being excited about. Right now, the third live-action Sonic the Hedgehog movie is near the top of my list of Things I Must Survive Long Enough To Experience. This isn’t because I think the movie will be great, or even good, it’s because Shadow the Hedgehog, the best character in the franchise, is set to appear as a main character. All those feelings of excitement and existential dread have been roused today, as Paramount has released a picture of the angsty, broody, gun-toting king on set…well, his feet, at least. Read More

Amouranth Spends $17 Million On Fruit Field To ‘Overtake’ Bill Gates

Screenshot: Amouranth / Kotaku

Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa, one of livestreaming’s most recognizable women, is something of a tour de force. She’s building an empire, after all, having bought a gas station, purchased an inflatable pool company, sold water straight from her hot tub, and slung beer made with her vaginal bacteria. Love her or hate her, Amouranth is a savvy businesswoman making millions upon millions of dollars every year. Now, she’s using some of those millions—17 of them, to be precise—to add another expensive purchase to the pile: a 2,213-acre fruit orchard in and around Florida. Read More

Starfield Isn’t Boring Actually, Bethesda Tells Steam Reviewers

Image: Bethesda

The meta-narrative around Starfield just took a very weird turn. Steam reviews for the sprawling sci-fi RPG recently fell to “mixed” on Valve’s storefront, and now Bethesda employees are arguing with players in the comments about why the game isn’t as boring and soulless as some of them claim. Read More

Destiny 2 Players Are Roasting Its New ‘Starter Pack’ [Update: Bungie Deletes It For ‘Not Bringing Joy’]

Image: Bungie

The hardest thing about Destiny 2 is getting any of your friends to play it. Fans of Bungie’s ambitious and imaginative sci-fi shooter have long hoped for a simple on-ramp that would make it easier to get lapsed players and newcomers back into its universe. Destiny 2’s new “Starter Pack” might sound like exactly that. Instead, it’s a pricey bundle of random items that fans can’t stop dunking on. Read More

Overwatch 2 Is Stripping Away What Made Mythic Skins Worth The Grind

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

When Overwatch 2 shifted the hero shooter’s economy away from loot boxes and into a seasonal battle pass, the customizable Mythic Skins unlocked at the end of that pass were framed as the light at the end of the grindy tunnel. Unlike any other Overwatch skin, these would be somewhat customizable, offering a few style and color options for players to make them their own. In the game’s first year, seven of its iconic heroes have gotten one of these Mythic skins, which mostly been well-received. But after Blizzard revealed season eight’s skin for tank character Orisa, players are noticing a downward trend in Mythic Skin quality. Read More

Rockstar Co-Founder & GTA Lead Writer Finally Reveals What He’s Been Working On

Photo: Absurd Ventures / Kotaku / Patrick McMullan (Getty Images)

Dan Houser, who co-founded Rockstar Games and was the lead writer on multiple Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption games, has finally revealed what his new studio is working on. If you were expecting a video game…well, you’ll have to keep waiting. Read More

Dragon’s Dogma 2 Joins A Divisive Gaming Trend

Image: Capcom

Dragon’s Dogma 2 looks awesome, right? The much anticipated action role-playing game about dragons and pawns came out swinging with a hefty new gameplay showcase on November 28, showing off the impressive character creator and some spectacular combat and officially revealing a March 24, 2024 release date. One thing that isn’t so awesome, however, is the game’s relatively high price tag of $70, which marks the first game from Capcom at this price. Read More

Call Of Duty Breaks Silence On Skill-Based Matchmaking

Image: Activision

The November 10 launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III reignited the seemingly endless debate about multiplayer matchmaking, with players demanding Activision and Infinity Ward provide details, or even abolish it entirely. This conversation has perpetuated across multiple Call of Duty releases, but the team behind the popular first-person shooter has yet to properly acknowledge it—until now. On November 30, an official statement was shared by popular CoD website CharlieIntel on X (formerly Twitter). Read More

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December 2, 2023
Kotaku’s Biggest Gaming Culture News For The Week November 18, 2023

From mergers to memes, the landscape of interactive entertainment is always in motion. Here’s your cheat sheet for the week’s most important stories in gaming.

6 Things To Know Before Starting Persona 5 Tactica

Baldur’s Gate 3’s New Deluxe Edition Is A Steal For The Price

Screenshot: Larian Studios / Kotaku

Baldur’s Gate 3 already has one special edition, in the form of its Collector’s Edition. We even unboxed it here at Kotaku, and it’s got a lot of cool knickknacks that pay tribute to its tabletop roots. Of course that was expensive, solely for PC and PlayStation 5 players, and didn’t include a physical copy of the game itself. But Baldur’s Gate 3 is coming to Xbox next month, so Larian Studios is taking the opportunity to release a new, Deluxe Edition for all three platforms. And given what comes in the box, I think it’s pretty darn affordable. Read More

The Best Soulslike Of 2023 Just Got Easier

Image: Neowiz Games / Round8 Studio

Like game director Ji Won Choi promised in early November, duo-developers Neowiz Games and Round8 Studio have dropped a new update for their gothic, Belle Époque-era Soulslike RPG, Lies of P. And just as expected, this update makes some significant changes to the game so that you have an actual fighting chance at surviving this bloodied retelling of the Pinocchio story. Read More

Modern Warfare III Players Beg For OP ‘Groot’ Skin To Get Removed

Image: Activision

Modern Warfare III players are begging Activision to remove a “literally invisible” cosmetic first introduced in Modern Warfare II that’s plaguing multiplayer matches yet again. Read More

Valve Has A Plan To Stop Bots And Resellers From Hoarding The New Steam Deck

On November 16, Valve will let folks purchase a new Steam Deck OLED Limited Edition model, which features all the upgrades of the base OLED version of the portable PC, but with some extra cosmetic details, too. And to help folks actually get a chance to buy this thing, Valve is implementing some safeguards to slow or stop bots and resellers from buying them all up instantly. Read More

Hades Is Joining The Best Free Game Library Nobody Uses

Image: Supergiant Games

One of the best action-RPGs in a generation is finally getting a mobile version, but it’s a mixed blessing. The good news is that Hades is coming to iPhones in 2024 and will be free for Netflix subscribers. The bad news is that it will be exclusive to both, with no way to buy the game outright or play it on Android devices. Read More

Suicide Squad Game Resurfaces With Big Map And Live-Service Plans

Rocksteady is finally ready to start talking about Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, after delaying it (again) earlier this year. The studio first announced its upcoming supervillain co-op action game way back in 2020. In a new video series going behind the scenes of the game, the devs explained how big its map will be and showed off some new cutscenes. Conveniently, they barely mentioned any of the live-service aspects fans aren’t happy about. Read More

Here Are Your Picks For The Biggest 2023 Game Awards Snubs

Photo: JC Olivera (Getty Images)

Geoff Keighley’s Game Awards are far from the be-all and end-all of which games are good, creatively bold, and deserving of praise each year, but they’re still fun to get way too serious about. It’s the one day game developers get to dress fancy, go up on stage, and receive our collective thanks for their artistic accomplishment rather than getting canned the night before the quarterly earnings call. Read More

Former Mass Effect Lead Forms New Studio To Make Narrative-Focused Games

Screenshot: BioWare / Kotaku

Chinese publisher NetEase is opening a new studio with the lead writer behind the Mass Effect series at the helm.

Worlds Untold will be based in Vancouver, and helmed by CEO Mac Walters, who’s known for his work at BioWare that spanned almost 20 years. Walters was a writer on martial arts RPG Jade Empire, then a senior writer on the first entry in the sci-fi RPG series, Mass Effect, and was eventually promoted to lead writer on Mass Effect 2 and 3. Following this, he was brought on as creative director on Mass Effect: Andromeda, worked on early narrative direction on Anthem, and project directed the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition remasters, before ending his tenure at the studio as a production director on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. So he was at the forefront of a lot of the narrative direction of BioWare’s last two decades. How you feel about that probably varies depending on your opinions on the state of the studio, but speaking personally, the narrative wasn’t my biggest problem with most of those games. Read More

Kotaku Unboxes The Spider-Man 2 Limited Edition PS5

Kotaku Unboxes The Spider-Man 2 Limited Edition PS5

The $600 set is currently sold out at PlayStation’s store but is still a gift to keep in mind for the Spidey-loving gamer in your life this holiday season

Total Recall: How Does KotOR Hold Up In 2023?

How Does KotOR Hold Up In 2023? | Total Recall

We look back at what made BioWare’s first Star Wars RPG one of the most celebrated of all time

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November 18, 2023
Kotaku’s Opinions For The Week November 18, 2023

Gamers are a passionate bunch, and we’re no exception. These are the week’s most interesting perspectives on the wild, wonderful, and sometimes weird world of video game news.

6 Things To Know Before Starting Persona 5 Tactica

This Is What It Looks Like When A Massive Video Game Publisher Messes Up

Screenshot: Embracer / Kotaku

This is Lars Wingefors, the CEO of Embracer, a Swedish holding company that owns multiple video game publishers, dozens of studios, and employs over 16,500 people. Or at least it used to. Embracer has been laying off hundreds, canceling projects, and closing studios as it reckons with deals that fell through, ambitious bets on big games, and an unprecedented acquisition spree that saw the investor group hoover up everything it could, from the studio behind Deus Ex to the license for The Lord of the Rings. One company to rule them all. That seemed to be the extent of the strategy. Read More

Kotaku Asks: Who Got Snubbed At The Game Awards Nominations?

Photo: Kevin Winter (Getty Images)

This week, creator and host of The Game Awards, Geoff Keighley, revealed which games are in the running for prizes at his showcase in December. Dozens of games were named across over 30 categories. What was missing? Read More

Persona 5 Tactica Tries To Make Up For The Series’ Homophobia

Image: Atlus / Kotaku

I love Persona 5, but over the years, Atlus’ stylish, supposedly socially-conscious RPG hasn’t loved me. Queer Persona fans know the series to be fraught, and even the most passionate among us treat it like the fun uncle who claims to love everyone and still says something extremely out of pocket each holiday. I figured Persona 5 Tactica, the tactical spin-off launching on November 17, would follow all the previous games and find some way to throw a jab at queer people for no reason. But after years of feeling like one of my favorite series has been trying to push me out, Tactica opened the door for me, if only for a moment. Read More

Dear Video Game Industry, Please Name A Woman

Photo: Dean Drobot (Shutterstock)

It’s been nearly a decade since GamerGate, the misogynistic game industry tantrum that harassed women under the guise of demanding journalistic ethics—yet 2023 has felt like we’re not that far past it at all. Read More

Modern Warfare III Multiplayer Is A Helluva Nostalgia Trip

Image: Activision

Say what you will about Modern Warfare III—it was developed in a confusing rush, hence why its campaign mostly sucks, and it’s currently the worst-rated Call of Duty game in the franchise’s 20-year history—but god damn, does its multiplayer make me feel like I’m in college again. Read More

Crash Team Rumble’s Latest Cameo Makes Me Want A New Spyro Game

Image: Activision / Kotaku

I liked Crash Team Rumble. I even said as much on this very website when the brawler MOBA launched back in June. But man, seeing them add Spyro, Crash’s flying, fire-breathing, OG PlayStation platformer contemporary to the roster just makes me wish we had a new Spyro the Dragon game. Read More

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November 18, 2023
Diablo 4’s Next Season Looks Pretty Gruesome In New Trailer

Screenshot: Blizzard / Kotaku

During Gamescom’s Opening Night Live presentation, Blizzard took to the stage alongside host Geoff Keighley to announce that Diablo IV’s next update, Season of Blood, will start on October 17—just in time for Halloween.

Diablo IV – Bear Bender Build

Much like Diablo IV’s current update, Season of the Malignant, Season 2 will introduce five new and returning endgame bosses, and will also come with changes to renown rewards, gem and stash storage, and resistance and status effects. While the studio didn’t divulge details on what those updates will be just yet, Blizzard came through with a new trailer showing off what to expect come this October.

Diablo

Read More: There Are Officially Too Many Video Games Launching In October 2023

If you thought that looked kinda gruesome, well, I’m right there with you. With vampire hunter Erys at your side, it’ll be up to the two of you to put an end to a new threat roaming the lands of Sanctuary. Erys is voiced by Gemma Chan, who you might recognize from Captain Marvel (Minn-Erva), Raya and the Last Dragon (Namaari), Crazy Rich Asians (Astrid), and Eternals (Sersi), among other films and TV shows. Revealing that this is her first video game performance, Chan, alongside Diablo general manager Rod Fergusson, briefly talked about the “badass warrior companion” Erys, some “cool vampiric powers” at your disposal, and a “big bad vampire lord” you’ll face at Season of Blood’s end.

Read More: Diablo IV Is About To Make Loot Way Better For New Characters

But that’s not until October 17. For now, Season of the Malignant is still going on, and unfortunately, things haven’t been going well. After a controversial change to player power level, the studio addressed the community by promising to not make classes weaker, which Blizzard is aware leads to a “not fun” experience overall. Here’s hoping things go better with Season of Blood.

Levi Winslow

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August 22, 2023
That Bloodborne-Looking Pinocchio Soulslike Has A Demo Now

Screenshot: Neowiz / Kotaku

During Summer Game Fest, host Geoff Keighley debuted a new Lies of P trailer that came with some gorgeous classic music. There was a treat in it, though: the Bloodborne-inspired Soulslike is not only coming to most platforms on September 19. But you can play the action RPG right now if you wanted to.

GamersPrey

Levi Winslow

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June 8, 2023
The Kid Who Crashed The Game Awards Has A History Of Trolling

Screenshot: The Game Awards / Kotaku

Academy Award winner Al Pacino may have opened the 2022 Game Awards, a night of industry recognition and expensive marketing for the biggest games around, but it was a new type of internet celebrity who closed it out. “I want to nominate this award to my reformed Orthodox Rabbi Bill Clinton,” said a young kid with long hair who appeared onstage suddenly after Elden Ring was crowned Game of the Year. He was wearing an ill-fitting coat, sneaking up on stage behind the the Elden Ring development team.

Security followed, and chaos ensued online as everyone tried to figure out what the hell had just happened during host Geoff Keighley’s otherwise heavily orchestrated three-hour event. But this was far from the first time the young man, whose name Kotaku believes to be Matan Even, had sprung to brief internet fame through internet-pilled trolling, even if it might have been his weirdest.

After the ceremony finished, Keighley tweeted that the “individual who interrupted” the event had been arrested. Five hours later, however, Even was already tweeting. “Today there is a lot of talk, and speculation,” he wrote. “More information will be released on all fronts sooner than later.”

When asked about what transpired after the incident, the LAPD media relations office contradicted Keighley’s account, saying a report had been taken but no arrest was made. When asked to square that, a spokesperson for The Game Awards provided a more detailed account.

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They said Even was taken to a “secure area” inside the Microsoft Theater by TGA security staff where he was then questioned by venue security as well as “TGA-hired onsite LAPD officers.” They said he was then taken into custody and transported to a local police station for booking by the TGA-hired LAPD officers in their patrol vehicle. When asked about that version of events, a representative from the LAPD would only confirm that the individual had been transported to a station. Since no arrest was made, it’s unclear how long he was held for questioning.

While this may be the first time Even risked arrest, it was far from his first publicity stunt. Before stealthing his way on stage at one of the gaming industry’s biggest events of the year in front of an audience of over a million people, Even crashed a BlizzCon panel, went viral for pranking the L.A. Clippers fan cam, and appeared on right-wing conspiracy show Infowars at least twice.

The Clippers stunt came in October 2019. Amid the Hong Kong protests, Even momentarily appeared on the fan cam at the team’s home stadium, only to immediately hold up a black t-shirt that read, “Fight for Freedom Stand with Hong Kong.” China had blacklisted the Houston Rockets after their general manager tweeted out a picture of the same t-shirt just a couple of weeks earlier.

The next month, Even interrupted a BlizzCon 2019 panel with a similar message in support of the Hong Kong protests. Blizzard had suspended Overwatch pro Chung “Blitzchung” Ng Wai the prior month for doing the same, and along with the NBA and other companies, came under fire at the time for its failure to stand up for Hong Kong’s democratic protesters.

As Motherboard points out, this made Even a ripe target to be co-opted by right-wing political actors who saw the opportunity to attack seeming liberal hypocrisy on the issue. But Even was also apparently already a big fan of at least one of Infowars’ hosts, Owen Shroyer. He said as much in a 2019 appearance, calling Shroyer his “favorite person on Infowars,” while in a second appearance in 2020 Shroyer called Even “one of the young stars of the conservative movement.”

While Even’s own social media activity appears to be almost exclusively concerned with the Hong Kong protests and censorship by the Chinese government, his journey from protester to Infowars guest is also a perfect example of the ambiently reactionary online pipeline that can lead one from Googling political issues to ending up on right-wing content channels. (Even was seemingly 12 during his first Infowars appearance.) It’s also a reason why some were quick to interpret his nonsensical remarks about Bill Clinton and Orthodox Judaism as potentially antisimetic.

Prior to last night, Even’s last tweets were from March 2021 and were about concerns over the rise in hate crimes toward Asian Americans. Infowars, meanwhile, has seen founder Alex Jones successfully sued for hundreds of millions by the parents of the Sandy Hook school shooting victims. Most recently, however, the site tried to hold court with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who used the appearance to praise Hitler, a heel turn that comes amid a larger wave of antisemitism in conservative circles.

It was in front of that backdrop that some worried Even’s stunt was secretly some racist 4Chan deepcut. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who interviewed Even earlier today, said he appeared to understand Hebrew, and called him “almost certainly a Jewish prankster.”

He’s also disavowing his previous Infowars appearances, even while continuing his trolling in messages with other journalists.

“I never was an avid viewer [of Infowars] nor am I now,” he told Motherboard. He reportedly went on to call Clinton “a true inspiration, especially in the gaming space.”

Ethan Gach

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December 9, 2022
Milf Hunter Won A Steam Deck And You Didn’t

Screenshot: Steam.TV | Kotaku

One of the main advertising gimmicks of tonight’s Game Awards was a promotion being run by Valve that would see a viewer win one of the company’s prized Steam Deck handhelds every minute.

As we reported last week, to be eligible you had to be watching the show on Valve’s own Steam.TV website:

As announced November 30, Valve is celebrating The Game Awards with a massive Steam Deck giveaway. The company will be giving out a free handheld PC to a single person every minute for the entire run of The Game Awards. (Never in history has someone wanted The Game Awards to run long, until now…) To have a chance, you’ll need to first register for the drawing, which you can do now, then watch The Game Awards via Valve’s Steam.TV website.

It was an odd promo for a number of reasons. Firstly, because as early as the first major award presentation the show was clearly running way over time, something even host Geoff Keighley had to acknowledge in relation to the giveaway. And secondly, because of who won.

During Christopher Judge’s acceptance speech, which, yes, did run long but was also incredibly emotional and heart-warming, the winners of Steam Decks started popping up. So while Judge was up there, pouring out his heart, the rest of us were witness to:

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People who were either disappointed (a minority) or who found it incredibly funny (the majority) began tweeting their congratulations to Mr or Mrs Hunter, which led at one point to “Milf Hunter” becoming a trending topic in the United States across all of Twitter.

Given “Milf Hunter” is also the name of a porn outlet, and The Game Awards have almost zero cultural penetration outside this bubble, you can understand some people’s confusion:

Screenshot: Twitter

I mean, it is definitely where that site is heading, don’t get me wrong. Just not tonight.

If you missed this, or any other Game Awards stuff, we’ve got you covered with this roundup, which includes everything from a Death Stranding 2 reveal, to a Hades 2 announcement, to Al Pacino.

Luke Plunkett

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December 8, 2022
Street Fighter 6 Drops In June With Cool 2v2 Mode

Screenshot: Capcom

You may have already seen, but Street Fighter 6‘s June 2, 2023 release date leaked late in the day on December 8. Apparently Sony, whether accidentally or intentionally, published the date on the PlayStation Store, alongside three different editions that will be available come launch. Now, during Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards, Capcom confirmed the date is in fact real. Mark your calendars, folks: Street Fighter is coming back next year.

Street Fighter 6 – Pre-Order Trailer

The Game Awards dropped a new trailer for Street Fighter 6 during the pre-show, where we saw fighters travel around the (digital) world: France, Italy, the United States, and the like. There were also some minigames, including bottle chopping, board breaking, and basketball blocking. Weird stuff. We also saw some new characters, such as the capoeira fighter Dee Jay and the gladiator brawler Marisa, alongside a cool-looking 2v2 mode where a player-created fighter and Ryu battled against two other fighters on the same screen at the same time.

Street Fighter 6 is looking wild.

The June 2023 release date slip-up was spotted on the PlayStation Store by Twitter users bestprosplay3 and SurpriseBum. It then proliferated on gaming forum website ResetEra, with preorder pages allegedly corroborating the date. There appear to be three editions of the game: Standard, Deluxe, and Ultimate. The Standard Edition will apparently come with the base game, one outfit color for six unspecified characters, and “special titles and stickers.” The Deluxe and Ultimate versions feature the same stuff, with the only difference being the Deluxe packages the Year 1 Character Pass, whereas the Ultimate houses the Year 1 Ultimate Pass. Prices for these editions weren’t disclosed at the time.

Read More: Street Fighter 6 Is A Fighting Game Newcomer’s Dream

More than seven years after Street Fighter V came out in February 2016, Street Fighter 6 is Capcom’s latest entry in the long-running fighting game series. It’ll feature all the usual characters—Chun-Li, Guile, Ken, Ryu, etc.—as well as some new faces, such as the fire-fisted Luke and (my personal fave) the kunoichi Kimberly. There are some new elements introduced in the upcoming entry, too, including the combo-breaking Drive Impact move, a robust character creator you can use in the single-player open world, and the incredible training mode that actually teaches you fighting game lingo. It’s an exciting release I’m stoked to get whooped in.

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You don’t have to wait long to get your hands on the game. Yes, it does drop in June 2023, which is about six months away. But if you were part of Street Fighter 6‘s first closed beta, you can check out the second one that runs from December 16 to 19. Even if you didn’t get an invitation to play the first beta, you can still submit an application to get in on the second one through the game’s website. Two caveats here, though. The first is you must have a registered Capcom ID account. The second is that account must then be linked to whatever platform you’re applying to play on. Once you meet that criteria, and should you be selected, you will gain access to Street Fighter 6.

If you weren’t lucky enough to be picked for access to the game’s second closed beta, however, you will just have to wait until Street Fighter 6 launches in full on June 2, 2023. The game will land on PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam.

Levi Winslow

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December 8, 2022
Sonic Frontiers Fans Are Convinced Genshin Impact Is Bribing Its Community For TGA Votes

Image: HoYoverse

There’s a corruption controversy rocking The Game Awards, and it’s about…Genshin Impact? Apparently, there are a lot of Sonic Frontiers fans and TGA fans who think the gacha game’s ascent in the Players’ Voice award category has been suspicious, and they’re loud about their displeasure. Things got so heated that TGA host Geoff Keighley addressed bribery and botting accusations in today’s Reddit AMA.

Genshin Impact has a premium currency called primogems, which is used to roll for limited time gacha characters. Primogems are distributed sparingly compared to other gacha games, so the community likes to joke that Genshin players will do anything for them.

You probably see where I’m going with this. Rather than organic popularity and interest, there’s been speculation that Genshin players are instead motivated by primogems. Last year, Genshin Impact won the “Best Mobile Game” award at TGA. After the show, HoYoverse gave 10 gacha rolls to all of its players. Kotaku reached out to HoYoverse to ask whether or not it plans to distribute free primogems after TGA this year but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

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One redditor went on Keighley’s Reddit AMA to ask what he was going to do about “bribery” and “botting” in the player’s choice awards.

“I think it’s fan bases activating to support a game, or a game promoting its nomination to its fan base,” Keighley wrote. “This is part of the reason we don’t have 100 percent fan voting in the main categories.” However, he promised that TGA would be “looking into this now.”

It’s been interesting to see which games players believe should win over Genshin. Some were upset that it might win over God of War Ragnarök or Sonic Frontiers. God of War, I understand. The blockbuster action-adventure game was beloved by critics across the board. On the other hand, critics panned Sonic for being tedious. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that both Sonic and Genshin are benefitting from having a high profile IP. Except one series is considered more institutionally legitimate than the other.

To those who are genuinely upset about the possibility of HoYoverse utilizing its fanbase to push Genshin to the top: You know that The Game Awards is a marketing engine, right? I promise you that this is not a corruption scandal on par with the Panama Papers or Watergate. Personally, I prefer to rely on friends or certain video game bloggers to tell me what games are good.

As of writing, Sonic Frontiers is at the top of the Players’ Voice category with 17 percent of the vote.

Sisi Jiang

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December 2, 2022