Finish of an period

Polygon was founded in 2012 when Vox Media spent significant money to poach prime journalists from common gaming blogs like Kotaku, Joystiq, and The Escapist. After initially publishing because the Gaming part of Vox.com for just a few months, the Polygon area launched alongside a series of flashy videos hyping up the workers’s lofty targets for online game journalism.

Within the years since, Polygon has turn into a revered supply for information and views on the gaming and leisure industries—one which Ars Technica has cited steadily throughout my tenure as senior gaming editor.

“Simply utterly sickened by this information,” Polygon cofounder Brian Crecente shared on Bluesky. “Principally for these so immediately and deeply impacted, but additionally for the dwindling variety of publications severely protecting video video games.”

New Polygon proprietor Valnet publishes dozens of Web content material manufacturers, which collectively have over 260 million page views. However the writer, based by Pornhub co-founder Hassan Youssef, has earned something of a reputation over time for exploitative work circumstances and quick-churn, clickbait content material. One contributor to Valnet-owned Collider told The Wrap final 12 months that the location runs as “a content material mill, borderline like virtually sweatshop-level,” with writers “consistently being pushed to put in writing extra, to do it faster.”

“We’re proud to have constructed Polygon into the gaming authority for each consultants and informal followers alike, a publication that has knowledgeable and delighted tens of tens of millions of gaming fanatics since its founding at Vox Media greater than a decade in the past,” Vox Media co-founder, chair, and CEO Jim Bankoff said in a statement.