How do we feel so far about Patrick @ Kotaku?

Forgive me if there's another thread identical to this, just point me to it and that'll be that.

I think my opinion probably falls in line with most of yours, and that's that he's too good for for Kotaku. After so many well thought out articles and news pieces, the site that regularly posts things like "This New Epic Rap Battle Will Change Your Life, Forever" feels regressive for him to move to. At the same time, he could start initiating a lot of change, and even now if you see a thoughtful article posted it'll usually have him or Stephen Totilo as the author. I liked Leigh Alexander's work there for a short time before she moved on to better things.

Can Patrick help change the ridiculous tone of the website? Or will Snacktaku consume him?

Haven't really followed him. Read his first article over there, but I honestly dislike Kotaku too much to go there regularly.

Kotaku posts dumb stuff, but they've had "thoughtful" articles written by tons and tons and tons of people who aren't Totilo or Klepek for years. So I'd say Patrick isn't too good for them, he fits right in.

And don't forget where Giant Bomb came from. This is a website with fake rap videos and footage of grown men laughing wildly at a cake being flushed down a toilet, among other things. So how exactly Kotaku is a regression is lost on me, other than the simple fact that Giant Bomb is awesome, and Kotaku is not. I hate click bait news as much as anyone else, but let's not pretend Giant Bomb is the New Yorker (uh uh uh uh uh) or some shit, huh?

Personally I never liked the news articles on GB, they felt out of place and often more editorial than news. Kotaku makes perfect sense for Patrick's style, I like him there.

Honestly, I feel like he's disappeared from my radar since he's been at Kotaku. I don't really follow anyone on Twitter much, and his articles have just been kind of swallowed up by everyone else's, or just not anything I'm interested in. Bums me out. I'm sure he's still working hard and everything, I just don't think it's the best fit. Hopefully he'll prove me wrong, however.

I don't go to Kotaku, and I never got much out of Patrick's content while he was here. He was not unfamiliar with ridiculous article titles himself.

I think all that really matters is that Patrick felt like that was the right move for him. We can be upset and believe it is a step backwards, but in his mind it was what he needed to do at the moment.

Im fine with his stuff there and I was already going to Kotaku as a secondary site (espn news style) but Giant Bomb is my first love so I'll probably not follow his stuff nearly to the same degree I did when he was here.

Miss him. Not sure why he left.

If Patrick felt like it was the move to make, then good for him. Personally I haven't missed him here all that much.

This'll probably sound a little rougher than I mean it to but I'm just glad he's writing Kotaku articles for Kotaku now, and not writing Kotaku articles for Giant Bomb anymore.

Patrick seemed to work hard and I miss his video contributions but I never found his writing as intelligent or thoughtful as others seemed to and I think the site is better without them.

I miss him because I basically just follow Giant Bomb and because the design of Kotaku absolutely sucks. I try to read his stuff every now but it takes too much digging through stuff that doesn't interest me for me to actually keep up.

I loved having Patrick here because, in a website that is very much based on personalities, having such a different personality and set of talents like Patrick's was incredibly refreshing and special. Giant Bomb is for me all about having different guys with different opinions hanging out and Patrick is very much missed in that regard.

That said, I'm sure the guys will find someone great to replace him and I'm sure he will do well on his endeavours. My hopes are that he eventually either comes back or starts something of his own.

I really enjoyed watching Scoops and Wolf (and Spelunking with Scoops), but honestly I haven't kept up much with him since he moved to Kotaku. I don't care enough for that site to visit it often honestly.

don't really read his articles. I went to Kotaku for i believe his first week, the only stories i found from him were. "Farcry 4 disappears from XBL" the next article was "Farcry 4 back on XBL" followed by another article "Why was Farcry 4 dropped from XBL we're trying to find out why."

Didn't care; still don't.

I do not visit that site, so I do not know. Loved him at GB though.

Patrick at Kotaku makes shit loads of sense. Although I enjoyed the morning show occasionally and I generally thought he was okay on the bombcast, I don't feel like he was a great fit at Giant Bomb. Case in point: he is the type of guy that would give up a job at Giant Bomb to work for fucking Kotaku.

This reads like A) personal projection and B) over generalization of both GB and Gawker

As far as I know the Giant Bomb community, being made up of thousands of individuals with wildly different beliefs, does not have a unified front concerning anything at all.

Except Vinny. We all love Vinny.

He's still putting up video content on his YouTube page if you want to fallow him there. He's done two spookin with scoops and a few Q&A videos;

https://www.youtube.com/user/patrickklepek

This exactly. My only complaint is that his work gets a little buried due to the sheer volume of content coming out of Kotaku, so I sometimes miss it, but otherwise I think it's a perfect fit for him.

As quite a few people in this very thread have demonstrated, he was clearly not appreciated here in the way (I believe) he should have been. I can't blame him for going to a website with both a structure that meshes with his style and an audience that doesn't largely treat him like shit.

I wish him the best of luck at Kotaku but I'm not going to be regularly following his work over there.

I was never an admirer of his outside of Spelunkin with Scoops. I'm surprised that more of his Kotaku output hasn't been linked on the forums here though.

There is just so much nonsense posted on Kotaku that you cant find the good stuff

@professoress:

This.

So hard this.

I miss Bombin' the A.M., I liked being able to hear from Patrick and Alex. Sucks that since Patrick left, we don't get Alex either. I'm very much ready for a GBE podcast.

I don't know he seems like a good fit over there. I don't see him post as often but i'm sure he is finding his footing. I don't think kotaku is all that bad aside from their parent company forcing dumb "we wanna be innovative and different just because" website/comment system redesigns that are almost always terrible.

I am sure he is a much better fit over at Kotatsu.

Say what you will about Patrick because i get not everyone will like him or his material. But i don't understand how the site is better without him, given the fact that i don't see how the site is better with less content.

Yikes some of you people with your bandwagoning and thinly veiled insults, even after the guy left. He's basically writing what he did here and it's all good quality, just at a slightly higher volume. Don't believe he's written a super in depth feature yet (ala EVE), but none of it reeks of clickbaitness that people like to bandy around about Kotaku. There's also a way to just view his articles for those of you deathly afraid of viewing Kotaku's site.

I continue to not read Kotaku.

Obviously not everyone here had a problem with him, but plenty of people did. They were very vocal about it and Patrick made it clear he was aware of that side of the community. I would be very surprised if this didn't factor in to Patrick's decision to leave.

Also, I'm pretty confident in my assessment of Gawker as a haven for like-minded progressives but you can believe whatever you like.

• On Giant Bomb, Patrick would post trailers for games with some brief comment about what he thinks of the game (same as Alex)
• On Kotaku, Patrick has been posting articles with game trailers or game announcements with 2-4 sentences about what he thinks of them
• On Giant Bomb, Patrick would post articles about whatever that he spent a few days or weeks working on and researching/interviewing
• On Kotaku, Patrick has been posting articles about whatever that he spent a few days or weeks working on and researching/interviewing
• On Giant Bomb, Patrick posted Spookin' and Q&A videos
• On Patrick's Youtube channel, Patrick has been posting Spookin' and Q&A videos

I don't see a huge difference in his output (aside from a distinct lack of Bombin' the AM). Kotaku has some shitlord editors that just have to repost viral videos and funny screenshots and whatever other bullshit they find on Reddit or NeoGAF because Kotaku has to try to be BuzzFeed to stay afloat, but Patrick doesn't seem like he has been designated to do that very much, instead being given the role of being a big boy reporter who actually gets to go write articles and editorials and whatever.

Honestly, I assume the move happened because Patrick is a games reporter/journalist first and foremost, and as much as he got some hot scoops while working at GB, I assume he wanted to get back to a job where he is writing almost full time. Working at GB was only ever a full-time writing gig for like, Alex, during that weird 2012-2014 period where Alex just lived in New York and wrote reviews. So making videos is a big part of working for GB, and as much as Patrick did his fair share, I wonder if Pat either felt that A) doing video content ate up a lot of his reporting/journalism time, or B) maybe he thought he wasn't quite pulling his weight in terms of video content, since it's all solo content and more infrequent than the site's other video content (obviously Jeff wasn't going to fire him for this, but I wonder if he felt he just wasn't a huge help to GB, working remotely in Chicago while GB is such a collaborative site between staff members).

At GB, it sounds like Pat had to take a lot of time out of his day whenever he did video content like Spelunkin' With Scoops or the Binding of Patrick or a Quick Look Solo. I'm assuming as he approached 30 he decided he wanted his career to be more defined by some big stories he writes and not a bunch of fun (but ephemeral) video content. I'm guessing he asked around and Kotaku was the easiest one to transition to because Patrick has previously worked with Stephen Totilo.

Anyway, Patrick seems like he's doing fine, but he does kinda get lost in the shuffle at Kotaku because they have so many damn editors and all of their headlines seem to be generated by an algorithm because I can rarely tell who wrote the headline. Kotaku seems like it has some ups and downs depending on who seems to be winning between the editor-in-chief and the Gawker overlords, but Stephen Totilo seems like he's trying his best to have some of the editors have the ability to write interesting stories.

He fits in better there. His articles here got a lot of praise in some circles, and I certainly appreciated his perspective more often than not, but they were always poorly copy-edited and often cut themselves off long before they'd made any kind of real argument. Most of his articles read as hot air to me, like someone trying to describe a fire by reading its smoke signals from a far off mountain. I liked the Interview Dumptruck at its height of production, and I felt Bombin' in the AM was an essential watch/listen, so it's not like I didn't like Patrick. But he spent a lot of time here and on his Tumblr talking about how much he likes to write while appearing a little sloppy and sophomoric in practice whenever an article of his turned up here.

Which works just fine at Kotaku, he's no longer "the writer", just another in a fleet of many. Maybe flexing that muscle more often will get him up to par with the others on the site, but honestly Evan Narcisse, Kirk Hamilton, Jason however you spell his name, Totilo and Tina Amini all have a little more to offer as writers, at least when I think back with vagueness over the past 12 months. I've never felt the toxicity emanating from Kotaku that others seem to, and while it certainly has a lot of garbage articles they also do a great job of engaging their community and writing very long (sometimes lately it seems they might not have any editors, but genuinely detailed gaming articles are few and far between so I appreciate the oversharing sometimes), very detailed pieces about topics that interest their authors. One of those things Patrick is very good at and there are rumors he's good at the other, hopefully that environment allows him to get his fastball back.

I also still regularly read his Tumblr and enjoy his Three Beers Down video podcast as a replacement for Bombin' though I sometimes wait until the end of the week to listen rather than immediately.

1. OP asks how people feel about Patrick being at Kotaku.
2. Some people say they don't miss him.
3. People get upset.

Eh?I don't see anything here that qualifies as insulting. Some people weren't a fan of his work. We are a diverse group of people with a wide range of opinions. Nobody said this was supposed to be a Patrick appreciation thread.

I want Patrick to return to GB, because he fits in better with the personalities of the hosts here. GB has personality. The hosts at GB disagree with each other, debate each other's points, create special sub-shows on areas of expertise that are unique to them and them alone. Kotaku always struck me as nameless, faceless contributors all speaking with the same voice.

And I kind of like the whole social justice angle he brought, I think more sites should try to do, or even be required to supply content like that.

I read a couple of his articles over there but its too inconvenient and somehow feels artificial now, here it felt like he was just trying stuff out to see if people like it and there was something cool about that, now leaving and trying to do the same thing over there kind of feels a bit hollow.

But honestly I think he is too concerned with being a journalist and not enough with just being a cool dude who loves games(like the GB crew). I know he won't be getting as much love over there(I am aware some of you duders didn't like him). Honestly I am still disappointed, I know GB is part of a corporation at this point but the crew really does behave like a cool family and I can't imagine why you would throw such a work environment away. Of course career wise too, I can't imagine Kotaku is growing any faster than GB, correct me if i'm wrong of course.

@ripelivejam: I'm not sure if I'd call the insults "thinly veiled" at all. They're pretty blatant.

Anyway, this site is worse off without Patrick whether people here realize it or not and I hope they find a suitable replacement soon.

I don't really miss his content. I think he fits in better over there.

The only real miss are the interviews he did, whether it be dumptruck or otherwise. Those were good and had a varied cast, ranging from developers at the forefront to EVO champions. I never really appreciated Patrick's style of news reporting/writing articles or his 'Worth Reading'. Only Patrick can know what is best for himself so it's all moot. I won't visit Kotaku though outside of the occasional Totillo/Schreier article.

@nodima said:

Yeah, I agree with you, as much I like Pat as a person (and I thought he actually shone on Bombin' the A.M. and had a good rapport with Alex).

Pat is a good reporter and interviewer, but I feel like his ability to make a compelling case for his opinions still needs a lot of work. Like you said, I feel like he'd come up with an interesting discussion subject for an article, but then his followthrough on it could be kinda rough and not particularly compelling. On Bombin', I always felt like Alex's ability to explain something about why a game was good or bad was far more well-formed and succinct (maybe that is just the years of reviewing experience Alex has compared to Pat).

Also, I feel like Patrick has always been shooting for a Brad Shoemaker-level vocabulary (English major vocabulary, I guess), but Pat either botches the meanings of more obscure words or just latches onto one or two and overuses them a lot (insert "ostensibly" reference here). Maybe he needs to find some website that will like, properly teach him a few new words a week and make you use them in enough sentences that you actually understand how to use the word or something. Like, he wants to be well read and use a diverse range of language, but he's in fake-it-til-you-make-it mode at present. Ostensibly.

In general, I just don't think Pat's ability to write rhetoric in a persuasive manner is really there yet. Practice makes perfect, I guess. At least I think the subjects/points he picks are generally reasonable, he just doesn't flesh them out well enough to make a memorable argument. Compare that to say Leigh Alexander, who is a hell of a writer but I think most of her article topics are asinine.

I only ever liked a few of his articles and for the most part I would just occasionally watch a Spookin' with Scoops or something. So the lack of his presence hasn't bothered me too much, especially since it means I don't have to read the comments on some of his more annoying community rage inducing articles.

I still find it weird though... It's like he got off the throne (Giantbomb) and went to roll around in the muck (Kotaku.) It's a decision I will never understand, but whatever makes him happy right?

Somehow my guy ended up coming out like the elven version of Daniel Craig.

To me, he ceased to exist.

I liked Patrick and miss a lot of his content (Bombing the A.M., spookin, spelunkin), but I will not go to kotaku for him.

Some lines can't be crossed

Sorry, spooks!

People dumping on other sites as a self-affirming hive minds while GB depends on being a giant cult of personality for its continued success is hilarious to me.

I've watched a couple Spookin' episodes that he did after he left but I have zero interest in going to Kotaku to see his written stuff

Holy crap. I wish I could star/like/thumb-up this comment a thousand times. So much this.

@turambar said:

As in... its false? I don't visit other sites much so I don't know but when I do get video/audio content i'm pretty confident in saying GB has more personality in its staff. Though I can't say much about the user base, there's some pretty diverse opinions on the off-topic section though.