The Kotaku brand is one step closer to death as Kotaku Australia shut down last week. We celebrate this fact and also discuss a D&D creator’s reaction to inflammatory remarks about the game’s origin, Japanese players petitioning for the cancellation of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, The Boys showrunner being a hypocrite when it comes to handling sexual assault on the show, and more.

Elden Ring’s expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, arrived to stellar reviews, but a Kotaku writer couldn’t help but use her article to compare her life of mean tweets to the brutality of the fantasy RPG. We discuss this ludicrous take (and our impressions of the DLC) along with the developers of the upcoming Black Myth: Wukong rejecting DEI consultants, woke devs finally realizing video game women are being uglified on purpose, Ubisoft’s hilarious reaction to Elon Musk’s criticism of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and more.

Ubisoft is finally making an Assassin’s Creed game set in feudal Japan, so who is the protagonist? A black samurai. We discuss the controversy around this decision along with Shift Up releasing uncensored versions of the Stellar Blade outfits they originally edited and how far Tomb Raider has fallen.

The developers of Farm Folks took to X to ask for fan input on breast physics in their game. The woke, of course, got offended, and the CEO apologized, starting a series of events that will likely end in the game’s failure. We discuss why you should never apologize to the left along with Sony’s attempts to ruin Helldivers 2 and Ghost of Tsushima, Microsoft closing several studios, Kotaku firing a handful of writers, and Hades 2 continuing to racebend Greek gods.

A few days before release, developer Shift Up promised their highly anticipated Stellar Blade wouldn’t be censored. Well, even before official release, fans discovered a fast one was being pulled: Several costumes and gore have indeed been toned down, and the developers tried to sneak it by gamers. We discuss the ramifications of such a game opting for censorship. We also talk about Kotaku’s hypocritical comments about the game compared to the “hot” characters of Hades 2, Pokemon Go’s wildly unpopular decision to uglify players’ avatars, Fortnite allowing gamers to block “offensive emotes,” and more.

The upcoming Tomb Raider: Shadows of Truth won’t be a Tomb Raider game at all, considering the developers are flipping the entire premise of the franchise on its head in the name of wokeism. We discuss this IP-killing move along with Microsoft’s guidelines for devs on how to design female characters, Kotaku sticking to “news,” Star Wars Outlaws' uglified protagonist, a couple community managers who hate white men and gamers, IGN France’s meltdown over Stellar Blade, and more!

An ex-Sweet Baby Inc. game developer working on the upcoming Black Panther game openly admitted to not hiring white people while working on an indie game because they make her feel “unsafe.” We discuss this blatant (and illegal) discrimination while highlighting all the ongoing Sweet Baby Inc. drama, including an interview with the Sweet Baby Inc. Detected page on Steam, Kotaku writers and developers weighing in, and more. Plus, we cover the Game Developers Conference nonsense, such as a reeducation panel for canceled devs.

Smaller games like Palworld, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Helldivers 2 are becoming increasingly popular while major studios are seeing major layoffs. Could one of the reasons be that these games aren’t tainted with the woke mind virus that seems to permeate the gaming industry as a whole? Sweet Baby Inc. is one example of a company determined to make games worse by inserting specific political ideologies into every game they consult on. We discuss the controversy surrounding the company that some are saying will spark Gamergate 2.0.

Crystal Dynamics remastered the original Tomb Raider trilogy and included a long trigger warning about how racist the games are. We discuss this virtue signaling along with the creator of Stellar Blade’s based opinion about attractive characters in media and the Xbox news that came about after a week’s worth of rumors about the end of the brand.

A Ubisoft executive recently said in an interview they want more players to get comfortable with the idea of not owning video games, instead turning to subscription-based models that have proven time and again to be detrimental to the fans. We discuss this growing trend along with bureaucrats telling Japanese developers to censor their games, Stellar Blade doing its best to ignore such advice, and some concerns with the upcoming live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender.