On Polygon

I’m an RSS feed guy. It’s a habit I started in college, back when I had as much free time as I was ever going to have, reading every article that came out on every site that I loved. Nowadays, I don’t have time to read everything that comes up in my feed, but I do like to see the headlines, the bylines, the lede. Even though I no longer have the time I had as a student, I like to stay in the know on tech and gaming news, which is why, for as long as it’s been around, I’ve subscribed to Polygon as one of the few sites I still keep in Reeder.

Today, that feed is largely empty, driving home the reality that yesterday really did happen.

If you read Backlog, you’ve probably already read the news, but just in case: As reported on Kotaku, Polygon has been sold to Valnet and was hit with massive layoffs. Regrettably, this is not an uncommon story in games media right now, and not even an uncommon story this week, with the seeming shuttering of Giant Bomb happening almost simultaneously (also as reported on Kotaku, again by the exceptional Ethan Gach). I am not a smart enough guy to be able to comment on the implications this has for the industry, beyond the obvious fact that these were two of the longest running and most respected sites out there. My heart breaks for the people who worked at both institutions. I wish I was able to offer more than general expressions of solidarity and as many reposts on Bluesky as I can muster. Still: I am so, so sorry. You all deserved better.

I’m a fiction writer who wandered into games criticism. I say “wandered,” but the truth is, I got some serious help early on from Chris Plante, former editor-in-chief of Polygon. When I was a nobody, and not, as I am now, nearly nobody, Plante hopped on a Zoom call with me when I was between jobs, trying to see whether I could pivot into doing some games writing. Our correspondence up until that point had been mostly me emailing him about my short story, “Brent, Bandit King,” which had won an award and was based on an article he’d written at the time for The Verge. Let me be perfectly frank: Very few people on this earth would email back a random stranger telling them they wrote a short story based on an article they wrote. Plante did. And not only that, but he offered sage advice to me when I was first getting Backlog going, a kindness for which I have no way of repaying him.

Besides Plante, I owe a lot to current and former Polygon folks like Mike Mahardy, Maddy Myers, and Matt Leone for their edits and guidance. But before I was a contributor, I was a Polygon reader, and that’s the part of me that’s mourning right now. For me, Polygon was my absolute favorite place to read about games, both on the reportorial side, thanks to powerhouses like Nicole Carpenter, and especially on the critical front, with its variety of voices, both in-house and freelance, who offered fresh takes on the art form I so love. For that to be more or less gone this morning is incredibly sad.

I don’t have a radical take to propose today besides to say that you should follow these writers wherever they go. People make the publication, and not the other way around, and when the business side loses track of that, we all suffer. I fear there will never be another Polygon, and as someone who cares about this medium, that’s a hard pill to swallow. The people of Polygon deserved better. The readers of Polygon deserved better. The industry deserved better.

For now, I just ask that you take time to follow and signal boost the affected writers, which you can do by using this resource created by Bluesky user kaylee rowena. My heart goes out to all of these workers, and it is my fervent wish that they all land on their feet. For now, let’s get them all stabilized, and in the future, let’s build a world where this kind of thing isn’t just a regular Thursday in games media.

Solidarity forever.