Kotaku UK

» see kotaku.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

I read Kotaku for years and could not have told you there were two of them. The design made that easy: Kotaku UK carried the same logo and the same layout, and unless you checked the domain or caught a spelling you were simply reading Kotaku. So the honest version of my relationship to this one is that I was probably a reader of it without knowing, some fraction of the time, across six years.

It launched in September 2014. Future Publishing, the Bath company behind most of the British magazine racks in games and technology, took a license on the Kotaku name from Gawker Media and stood up a UK edition with its own editorial staff. Gizmodo UK ran on the same arrangement. The pitch was straightforward: an American brand with an audience already in place, filled with writing by people who lived where the readers did.

It worked as journalism. Rich Stanton edited it, the writing had its own register, and it covered a games industry that Britain genuinely has, from the studios up. What it never had was ownership of its own name.

~ the dossier ~

~ the license lapsed ~

Gawker Media went bankrupt in 2016 and the sites were sold to Univision, which later spun them into G/O Media. Through all of that the UK license kept running, because a license is a contract and contracts survive their signatories. Then in September 2020 Future decided not to renew.

The rights reverted to G/O Media on Wednesday 9 September 2020 and the site stopped that day. There was no acquisition and no collapse. A six-year publication with staff and an archive turned off because the paperwork underneath it had run out, and Stanton posted the notice on the site itself.

~ the six years ~

British games coverage in the 2010s was consolidating hard into a small number of Future-owned brands, and Kotaku UK was an odd shape in that portfolio: a rented American masthead sitting next to titles Future had built and owned outright. From the inside it must have looked like paying rent on a name you were already good enough to compete with.

G/O Media, having taken the rights back, did essentially nothing with them. The URL a British editorial operation had been publishing to since 2014 sat unused after that.

~ where the writers went ~

They mostly stayed in games writing, which in Britain in 2020 meant Future's own titles or the slow drift toward doing it yourself on a newsletter. That drift is the larger story of the decade and Kotaku UK is a small clean instance of it. The trade kept going. The number of places willing to employ someone to do it kept shrinking, and one of them closed on a Wednesday for contractual reasons that had nothing to do with anyone's work.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »