12NovNovember 12, 2024
Editor of Kotaku and failed sex worker Alyssa Mercante has left Kotaku, right before it got hit by a massive round of layoffs.
I don’t like being fair to Mercante but I feel I need to be both to maintain my own standards for integrity and because she is incredibly litigious.
She did not put Kotaku in the position it’s in today. There was a string of terrible decisions that have been made starting with the shitcanning of Brian Crecente back in 2011 that would eventually leave Little Otaku stranded on the rocks
G/O Media, the company that was stuck with the mega-blog hot potato after the music stopped playing, is trying to “pivot to video” which a bunch of pop culture bloggers can’t really do. This means quietly killing the blogs it inherited from the ghost of Gawker. Back in July, Kotaku Australia was completely shutdown. That was about as big of red flag as you can get. I’m sure G/O sent out the usual e-mail saying, don’t worry your jobs are safe so don’t quit before we are ready to axe you on our own timeline. But if you stayed at the company where that big of a reduction in headcount is being made it’s time bailout.
Which Mercante has done.
Kotaku has become more and more of a bad joke. Its game reviews hadn’t been trusted since before Total Biscuit died. As for its hardware reviews this is the online magazine reviewer didn’t like the new Xbox because she was frightened of all its holes. Yes, that did happen.
Which was nothing compared to Kotaku’s review of the PS5:
But I’d be remiss to ignore all the reasons not to be excited for the PlayStation 5.
The world is still reeling under the weight of the covid-19 pandemic. There are more Americans out of work right now than at any point in the country’s history, with no relief in sight. Our health care system is an inherently evil institution that forces people to ration life-saving medications like insulin and choose suicide over suffering with untreated mental illness.
The editor (who wasn’t Mercante) didn’t have the sense that god have a pickle and spike this ridiculous bullshit. Admittedly, Kotaku had such a huge conveyor belt of bovine excrement rolling on to the internet that it probably was too much of a bother to select one pile that was no worse than all the others.
Realistically there was nothing Mercante could do to save Kotaku. Even if she tried to turn Kotaku back into the kind of online magazine that used to have this as its mascot…
… The ad money just isn’t there anymore.
Mostly she appears to have done the only thing she could in her situation and raised her profile by using her position to troll right wing influencers on YouTube.
But that is over now. The Costa Kotaku has flooded, keeled over and her captain has left the ship.
English (US) · 