// KOTAKU — GAMING
How To Share Story Tips With Kotaku
Here at Kotaku, we strive to cut through the noise and nonsense and tell you real, interesting, and thought-provoking stories about the world of video games. In order to help us do that, we want people who know things about those video games and everything surrounding them to be able to talk to us securely and anonymously.
So we’ve created a guide for anyone who wants to tip or share information with Kotaku, whether you’re a game developer, a customer service representative, a community leader, a PR representative, or a video game fan with a story to tell. The video game industry is shrouded in a culture of corporate silence that we do our best to penetrate every day, because we believe that people should have as much information as possible. So if you see or experience something that you think is important for people to know, or maybe just interesting, we want to hear from you, including in cases when you want your identity to be protected.
If you want to reach all of us, send your tips to: [email protected]
And if you want to send an e-mail to an individual Kotaku writer, find your favorite one on our masthead and shoot them a note.
Our tips inbox is only read by full-time staffers, and we check it every hour of every day. If you don’t get a response, don’t worry, we’ve definitely seen it. And if you read this entire page and still aren’t sure if you should send your tip, send it anyway. At worst, everyone at Kotaku will learn something new about the world of video games, and we’ll be grateful for it.
We’re interested in news involving any aspect of gaming: game development, publishing, sales, things going on within games, things people are doing with games, all of it. Sometimes that means reporting on big cancelled projects or doing in-depth looks at chunks of video game history. Sometimes it means exposing malfeasance—sharing stories about horrible work conditions at a game studio or reporting on a multinational company that isn’t paying its staff on time. Sometimes it means answering big questions that everyone’s asking, like why a game really keeps getting delayed over and over, or the events that led to a studio closure. We care about things that you yourself find interesting or surprising, and we want to help people know what’s cool to play and what to avoid.
We primarily want gaming news, of course, and we care about it whether it comes from a gamer, a game-maker, or anyone else who gives a damn about video games. And if you have pictures, screenshots, video, or other first-hand evidence of whatever you want us to know about, that’s a huge bonus.
We also, obviously, accept press releases, news about your cool indie game that’s about to come out, pitches from PR to interview developers or preview or review games, and all the usual stuff. We recommend sending those to individual writers you have relationships with if possible, especially if you already know someone on staff is familiar with your game/genre/franchise. But if you’re just trying to reach us for the first time, the tips email is fine for that too.
Sometimes, you might want to share something with us, but want to remain anonymous because having your name attached to that information could come with consequences of some kind. That’s totally okay. In most cases, the journalist you speak to will still need to verify your identity (to prove you’d be in a position to know what you’re claiming to know), but will keep that information entirely to themselves if you prefer. We strictly do not share any information about anonymous sources with anyone for any reason.
In stories where we refer to sources who spoke to us anonymously, we will generally refer to those sources with as few details as possible. Often, that will just mean writing, “a source familiar with the matter” or “an employee of [company]” or similar. Sometimes, some context clues will be necessary: for instance, if we’re writing about sexism at a studio, it may be important to identify the gend