Kotaku

Lore & Background

Kotaku was first launched in October 2004 with Matthew Gallant as its lead writer. About a month later, Brian Crecente was brought in to try to save the failing site. The site has launched country-specific sites for Australia, Japan, Brazil, and the UK. Notable former contributors include Luke Smith, Cecilia D'Anastasio, Tim Rogers, and Jason Schreier. The website was acquired by Univision as part of the Gizmodo Media Group in 2016, which was sold to a private equity firm and became G/O Media in 2019, and was again sold to the Swiss media company Keleops in July 2025.

In Their Own Story

The office is quiet at 11 p.m. A single desk lamp throws a warm cone over a half-empty coffee cup and a laptop still glowing with a draft headline. Outside, the city hums its indifferent electric hum. The editor sets the cursor blinking after the last sentence, reads it once, twice. Somewhere across the world, a player is finishing a game they discovered because of a paragraph written three weeks ago in a different city, by a writer who no longer works here. The cursor blinks. The save is committed. The lamp is switched off, and the room belongs to the dark again.

Reader's Guide

Kotaku covers video game news, reviews, and culture. It has faced controversies including a 2007 lawsuit from attorney Jack Thompson, a 2010 blacklisting by Konami, and a 2021 article about Metroid Dread emulation that was revised after a complaint from Nintendo. The site was blacklisted by Sony in 2007, by Bethesda and Ubisoft in 2015, and by Nintendo in 2023. It was involved in the Gamergate harassment campaign in 2014. In March 2025, former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick sued G/O Media for defamation over articles in Kotaku and Gizmodo.

Did You Know?

• Kotaku was launched in October 2004 with Matthew Gallant as its lead writer.
• Brian Crecente was brought in about a month after launch to try to save the failing site.
• The site's name combines the Japanese word otaku (obsessive fan) with the prefix ko- (small in size).
• Kotaku was sold to Keleops in July 2025.