Bolverk Games is back — as a news site, not a VR studio

Bolverk Games relaunches today. Same name, same domain, completely different job: from now on this is an independent gaming news site covering World of Warcraft, Blizzard, Twitch, streamers, Fortnite, esports and live streaming.

The first thing to get out of the way is what this is not. For its first decade, Bolverk Games made virtual-reality games, and it made a genuinely odd, genuinely good catalogue of them: the shotgun-and-swamp-monsters wave shooter Dick Wilde and its sequel, the alien-kitten tower defence game Kittypocalypse, the rolling platformer Glyph, and the Antarctic VR shooter Genotype. Small output, strong opinions, no visible interest in making the safe version of anything.

That studio closed. We acquired the estate — the name, this domain and the channels that came with it — and relaunched it as a news site. We did not develop those games and we do not support them; nothing published here speaks for the people who made them. If you arrived looking for Genotype, it is on Steam and Quest, and it is worth your evening.

Keeping the name was a choice. It would have been easier to invent something with no history attached, and duller. A name that already meant something to a few thousand people beats a clean slate nobody has heard of — provided you are honest about what changed hands, which is what this paragraph is for.

Seven beats, and nothing else

Most gaming sites cover everything, which in practice means covering most things at a depth of four paragraphs and a stock image. We are going the other way. Seven beats, permanently: World of Warcraft, Blizzard, Twitch, streamers, Fortnite, esports, and the streaming business around all of it.

Those seven are not a random slice. They are the parts of games culture that change on a Tuesday afternoon and then get reported badly — a class rework buried on page nine of the patch notes, a monetisation change slipped into a creator blog, a roster move that quietly decides a season, a “controversy” that turns out to be one clip and a lot of quote-tweets. If you follow those things closely, you already know how much of the coverage is a rewrite of somebody else’s rewrite.

The two-source rule, enforced in software

Every news story on this site is verified against at least two independent sources before it publishes. If we cannot get to two, it does not run — not as a “reportedly”, not as a “sources say”, not at all. The outlets behind each story are named at the foot of the article, and attributed in the prose where it matters, so you can always see who we leaned on.

Where a primary source exists we go to it first and say so in the text: the patch notes themselves, the developer blog, the official bracket, the filing, the storefront listing. An aggregator screenshot is a lead. It is never the evidence.

Yes, there is an AI in the newsroom. Here is exactly what it does

We are a small operation and we use an AI newsroom system to research and draft the daily news. We are telling you this on day one, in the launch post, rather than hoping nobody notices — and we have published the whole mechanism on a dedicated AI policy page.

The short version: it watches feeds for leads only — a headline and a line of gist, never the body of anyone’s article — then researches the story itself, finds the primary source and an independent corroborating outlet, and writes from the verified facts in its own structure. The two-source gate is not a polite instruction in a prompt. It is a hard check in code: under two verified sources, publication is blocked and the story is discarded.

Our reporters — Mira Kessler on WoW and Blizzard, Jonas Beck on Twitch and platforms, Sam Okafor on Fortnite and esports, Lea Vestergaard on streamers — are AI reporters with defined beats. They are not real people and we do not pretend otherwise: no invented CVs, no invented photographs, no invented decade of experience at a magazine that never employed them. Accountability sits with the publisher, and “the model wrote it” will never be offered as an excuse here.

What we will not do

• No paid links inside editorial copy, no paid guest posts, no link insertions. Not at any price, and the answer will not change if you email twice.
• No review scores bought with a review key. Keys, loans and travel are disclosed in the article they produced.
• No home addresses, no legal names people do not use publicly, no leaked private material, no drama coverage of minors.
• No tracking cookies and no advertising profiles. There is no consent banner on this site because there is nothing to consent to.

All of it is written down properly in our ethics and corrections policy, including how corrections work: at the top of the article, dated, in plain language. We will get things wrong. You will be able to see when we did.

Starting slow, on purpose

We are opening at two stories a day. That is a deliberate ceiling, not a limitation we are apologising for — a story that clears a real two-source check takes longer than a story that does not, and we would rather publish two we can defend than fifteen we cannot.

If you want it in your inbox instead, The Respawn goes out once a week with what actually mattered and what only sounded like it did. If you would rather not hand over an email address, the RSS feed is right there and always will be.

And if you know something — a change nobody has spotted, a policy shift nobody has read, a story that is being reported wrong — tell us. Off the record means off the record here, and we honour it before we read on.

This is an announcement from the Bolverk Games desk rather than a reported story, so it carries no source list. Everything else on this site does.