The company tried a similar approach in the spring of 2014 after we published early images of the then-unannounced Assassin’s Creed Unity - images that had been leaked to us by an independent source. The current Ubisoft blackout is actually the second in as many years. When top people at Bethesda started making statements casting doubt on our reporting, we published a leaked internal email confirming that those statements had misled gamers and that Arkane had indeed been working on a version of Prey 2. 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. In April of 2013 we reported insiders’ accounts of the troubled development of the still unreleased fourth major Doom game. The Bethesda blackout came after a year of reporting that was not always flattering to the Maryland-based publisher. It’s not an uncommon occurrence in gaming media, though it’s seldom discussed publicly. It happens to ones like Kotaku with millions of readers, too. We’re far from the only gaming media outlet that has been blacklisted. If they or their bosses don’t value an outlet, that outlet is left out. It is, after all, PR and marketing who try to control how big-budget video games are covered. This has happened at a PR and marketing level, leaving any developers at those companies who do want to talk to us or who do want to facilitate Kotaku coverage of their games to do so on the sly. When we ask them about their plans for upcoming games or seek to speak with one of their developers about one of their projects, it’s the same story. ![]() When we ask representatives from either company for comment or clarification regarding breaking news, we hear nothing in response. Ubisoft has been nearly radio silent since our December 2014 report detailing the existence of the then-unannounced Assassin’s Creed Victory (renamed Syndicate). The truth is that we’ve been cut off from Bethesda since our December 2013 report detailing the existence of the then-secret Fallout 4. Or perhaps they feared a repeat of 2007, when then- Kotaku editor-in-chief Brian Crecente embarrassed Sony out of blacklisting this outlet for reporting the existence of then-unannounced PlayStation projects. Maybe their spam filters were misplacing our emails. ![]() For a time, it was possible to make a good-faith assumption that this was just a short-term disagreement. Neither company has officially told us that we’ve been cut off. They have cut off our access to their games and creators, omitted us from their widespread mailings of early review copies and, most galling, ignored all of our requests for comment on any news stories. In those periods of time, the PR and marketing wings of those two gaming giants have chosen to act as if Kotaku doesn’t exist. For the past year, we have also been, to a lesser degree, ostracized by Ubisoft, publisher of Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and more. For the past two years, Kotaku has been blacklisted by Bethesda, the publisher of the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series.
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