The Bethesda blackout came after a year of reporting that was not always flattering to the Maryland-based publisher. In April of 2013 we
reportedinsiders’ accounts of the troubled development of the still unreleased fourth major
Doom game. In May of that year, we
reported that Arkane Austin, the Bethesda-owned studio behind
Dishonored, would be working on a new version of the long missing-in-action
Prey 2 and that some at the studio were not pleased about that. When top people at Bethesda started making statements casting doubt on our reporting, we
published a leaked internal e-mail confirming that those statements had misled gamers and that Arkane had indeed been working on a version of
Prey 2.
The current Ubisoft blackout is actually the second in as many years. The company tried a similar approach in the spring of 2014 after we
publishedearly images of the then-unannounced
Assassin’s Creed Unity—imagesthat had been leaked to us by an independent source. That article confirmed news about the company’s extraordinary plans to release two entirely different
AC games in the fall of that year, one for new consoles and one for old. Ubisoft had warmed back to
Kotaku by the summer of 2014, several months after the
Unityreport, but has cold-shouldered us since the
Victory story one year ago. It’s possible other articles angered them, too. But that
Victory piece is a safe bet.
I’m sure some people will sympathize with Bethesda and Ubisoft. Somewill cheer these companies and hope others follow suit. They will see this kind of reporting as upsetting, as ruining surprises and frustrating creative people. They will claim we are “hurting video games,” and, as so many do, mistake the job of entertainment reporting for the mandate to hype entertainment products.
