I don't see what the big deal is. Steam has all these restrictions and everybody loves Steam.

Killing off used games and tying game licenses to cloud accounts is part of a natural progression to digital distribution.

It is highly likely that nobody will ever love you as much as I love David Foster Wallace and Philip Roth.

Still doesn't make sense. The only 25 year-olds I know of who hang around with high school students are high-school teachers.

If it takes fifty people three years to make a game, it can be very expensive to pay all those salaries and keep the lights on until the game releases and makes money. The publishers help cover those costs, and also take on a lot of the financial risk of the game failing. A developer is like a film production…

Gamestop is a giant albatross around the game industry's neck. Book publishers don't ship new product to stores that sell used books, and I don't understand how the game industry got bullied into tolerating this, but it has to stop.

I feel bad for people who lose their jobs, but game development seems to be a volatile industry. I am not willing to blame publishers for all the ills of these failed games. When a studio that has never produced a game that scored above a 7.5 goes under, gamers just aren't going to mourn the loss of its passing.

Developers get a royalty based on sales. They also have various conditions that trigger bonuses, and the review scores are one of those.

I appreciate that game development is a difficult and volatile industry, and I feel bad for people who lose jobs. But I like excellent games, and a lot of developers are in the mediocrity business.

The reason gamers like Valve and tolerate its microtransactions is because Valve makes good products and markets them well, and the reason that EA inspires such rage is that it makes a lot of mediocre games and its marketing people seem to have a lot of contempt for gamers.

If a comic book is poorly written or drawn, that's one thing, but if you think a particular superhero is conceptually stupid, you're kind of missing the point of superheroes, because they're all kind of stupid, and many of the most storied and popular heroes are especially stupid because their histories are rooted in…

Lena Dunham got where she is because she made "Tiny Furniture," which is a feature-length film, for $65,000. Nobody sane believes that being Laurie Simmons's daughter gets you a production deal with HBO. Lena Dunham had connections that enabled her to get $65,000. Everything else happened because she's a major…

I'm strongly in favor of excellent art, and I despise mediocrity. So if you can show me talent that's banging on the gates of the Hollywood power-structure, I'll rally behind it. But if you're arguing for some kind of diversity considerations for creative work that's of even lower caliber than the stuff that's…

The question isn't whether these girls are "authentic" gamers or "real nerds." Authenticity isn't the prerequisite for streaming. Excellence is.

The AAA quality games most Kotaku readers probably play; stuff like Mass Effect and Halo and CoD cannot be replicated on a tablet or phone. The touch controls simply cannot support that kind of gameplay.

Numeric scores in game reviews skew high, compared to the scores film critics give. A 70% score for a major film signifies positive notices. For a game, this is dismal. When a major franchise title gets scores below the 8.5 range, it typically signifies a major disappointment. Scores in the 6.5 range for a…

I don't think people are anticipating Zynga's collapse, unless there has been some serious corporate mismanagement. I just think people are realizing that the business Zynga is in doesn't have the growth potential to justify the company's previous paper value. There was a point around the IPO when Wall Street…

A bad game doesn't become a good value at any price, because one day, I will be dead. That means my time is scarce. "Arkham City" is a very good game. "The Dark Knight Rises" does not appear to be a good game at all. A bad game does not have a percentage of the value of a good game. I am willing to spend my money…

This is a $7 iPad game, and you get what you pay for. This is a movie tie-in game, which means that the audience for the product is people who don't know better to buy movie tie-in games. If they had any intention of making a good game, they wouldn't throw a huge chunk of their budget into getting the license to…