If you wind up on the wrong side of Reddit or YouTube, you’ll likely come across bold declarations proclaiming “what gamers want.” Nine times out of ten, these takes are given in bad faith, often by people more concerned with imposing what they want than with understanding what the majority of players are truly interested in. But suppose, if only for the space of this article, we pretended otherwise. Suppose we considered “what gamers want” a constructive prompt rather than a rhetorical cudgel. In that case, the best and most honest way to find out what gamers want would be to consider what they read.
This list contains the 15 Kotaku stories people spent the most “engaged minutes” reading in 2024, per Chartbeat. The data is clear: Gamers want to know when the Nintendo Switch 2 will come out. They want to learn how to make the consoles they already have work better for them. They want to dive deep into whatever weird and wacky thing is happening in corners of the internet that the mainstream media isn’t paying attention to. And, perhaps more than anything, they want to read thoughtful writing about the games they play, the industry that makes them, and the discourse they inspire.
Don’t let anyone tell you differently.
No matter what you’re doing or what you’re playing at the moment, it feels like we’re all just biding our time until the announcement of the follow-up to the Nintendo Switch. Colloquially known as the Switch 2 around these parts, reporting on the forthcoming console has picked up tremendously since late last year, and rumors of its delay to 2025 spread like wildfire mere months ago. A slim 2024 release window for everyone’s favorite handheld console seemingly points to Nintendo holding back some titles for a console launch early next year, and all the while, more rumors of the Switch 2’s form factor and tech keep sprouting up. Nintendo hasn’t confirmed anything, but with gaming’s big season of reveals right around the corner, now seems like as good a time as ever for the company to straight up announce this thing and begin the rollout. With that in mind, here’s everything we currently know about Nintendo’s next-generation console. — John Walker, Moises Taveras
Don’t shoot the messenger, but even if you’ve played your Xbox consistently for the past four years and you think you know it inside and out, you may still be surprised by what your console is capable of. Just like the PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch, the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S have a bevy of hidden options, settings, and tricks that may even change how you use your console. — Kyle Barr
After all the delays, trailers, and start-and-stop hype cycles, Ubisoft’s highly(?) anticipated pirate sim Skull and Bones is in beta. The game was meant to release in 2018, then 2019, but at least now there’s an open beta and your progress will carry over into Skull and Bones when it launches on February 16. So, while this isn’t technically the actual retail game, it’s a good way to see just what all those years of development have made. I want to tell you that this epic saga ends happily. Alas… — Zack Zwiezen
A recent update for Bethesda’s popular post-apocalyptic spin-off, Fallout Shelter, added some characters from the Amazon Prime live-action TV show adaptation to the base-building game. While it’s fun that you can now have some of these characters, like Lucy and Maximus, in your own digital vault, it also reveals their SPECIAL stats, too. — Zack Zwiezen
In the summer of 2024, an entertainment project went more spectacularly wrong than possibly any entertainment project in human history. A venture that cost an approximated $400 million, and is thought to have made back only $1 million, representing a flop that dwarfs the likes of movie disasters Joker: Folie à Deux and Borderlands. Yet, if you don’t read the specialist gaming press, there’s a really good chance you’ve never even heard of it. — John Walker
Before Starfield, before Skyrim, before Fallout 3 and Oblivion, before your parents even knew how to make you, there was The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. It was, and remains, Bethesda’s biggest-ever game, and now a fan-made rebuilding of the entire vast world in Unity has reached its 1.0 release. Oh, and it’s entirely free, and won’t be destroyed by lawyers! This new Daggerfall is an almighty achievement, and exactly the excuse you needed to return to Tamriel. — John Walker
I can’t believe Dragon’s Dogma 2 exists. — Cole Kronman
Last week marked N7 Day, which means Mass Effect fans broke out the fan art and BioWare vaguely gestured at the upcoming fifth game. The studio said this year would be a quiet one, as the team just released Dragon Age: The Veilguard earlier in the week. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still discuss the series and reflect on its history while BioWare forges its future. Somehow, we’ve never done a ranking of the Mass Effect squadmates. While I would love to throw the Mass Effect: Andromeda characters into the mix, those intergalactic explorers have only gotten one game that was clearly building up to a continuation we haven’t gotten. So, rather than pit characters with unfinished stories against people with complete, messy, trilogy-long arcs, we’ll just rank the original squad from the first three games. Grab your omni-tool and let’s dive in. — Kenneth Shepard
Amazon’s Fallout show is, miraculously, pretty fun and great. It manages to capture the satire of the games and somehow makes it even sharper by trimming much of their fat. Because of this, the elements which the show lifts from the games feel like they’re lent even more space to shine prominently, and this is especially true of the storyline centering the horrors of the Vaults. An easter egg in Fallout’s sixth episode underscores those horrors in a manner that is as unsettling as it is hilarious. — Moises Taveras
As the Minecraft movie trailer broke yesterday afternoon, the internet was immediately abuzz with cynicism and disappointment, as adults across the world simultaneously expressed one thought: “Who is this film even for?” What almost every single one of them forgot is that they’re not nine-year-olds. — John Walker
Herschel “Dr Disrespect” Beahm was one of the biggest streamers on Twitch when the Amazon-owned streaming platform permanently banned him in mid-2020. The suddenness of the high-profile ejection, coupled with both Beahm and Twitch staying silent over what had actually happened and why, turned the incident into the most infamous and mysterious ban in the platform’s history. Now everyone’s talking about it again after a former Twitch employee recently purported to share the real alleged reason why Beahm got sent packing. — Ethan Gach
The 2024 Summer Olympics are the first ones to feature an official breakdancing competition alongside the traditional events like gymnastics, track and field, and volleyball. A star was not born, but a household name was. The 36-year old cultural studies professor Rachael “Raygun” Gunn shocked and delighted viewers with one of the most unexpected performances at this year’s games. — Ethan Gach
I was staring at a wall. It was an early mission in Ubisoft’s latest behemothic RPG, Star Wars Outlaws, in which I was charged with infiltrating an Empire base to recover some information from a computer, and this wall really caught my attention. — John Walker
Less than two years after self-help company Chicken Soup for the Soul bought Redbox, the corporation declared bankruptcy and now people are taking hundreds of movies out of the mostly abandoned DVD rental kiosks across the country. Some are even, with permission, taking the kiosks themselves. — Zack Zwiezen