Gaming Site Polygon Sold
Another major mainstream gaming news site has bitten the dust, or close to it, anyway. Yesterday, news broke that Polygon had been bought from Vox by Valnet, which also owns GameRant, DualShockers, and The Gamer, as well as more general entertainment websites like Collider, MovieWeb, ScreenRant, and Comic Book Resources, which is just CBR now (like KFC, I guess; how are you only your own acronym?). In their press release, Valnet praised Polygon and talked about what a great addition it would be to Valnet’s growing pack of gaming site acquisitions, but according to Kotaku, which seems to be the first site to report on the story, Valnet has laid off a lot of Polygon employees, including “over 20 staff.” Former Polygon employees are posting about their dismissals on the social media site and X alternative Sky (because of course these people are all on Sky), with the website’s “curation editor,” Pete Volk, saying that “just about everyone else at Polygon” has been let go, including himself. Kotaku says that deputy editor Maddy Myers and games editor Zoë Hannah have not been laid off.
Along with just about everyone else at Polygon, I am now out of a job, ending over a decade at Vox Media for me. Working at Polygon was a wonderful experience, and I’m proud of the work we did there. I will be looking for work, as well as starting my own project(s) on the side. Stay tuned!
— Pete Volk (@petevolk.bsky.social) May 1, 2025 at 11:31 AM
What does this acquisition mean? For Polygon, most seem to agree it portends the devolution of the site into a clickbait farm, which is apparently what Valnet does with the gaming websites it scoops up. (I’m not going to pretend I read these things on anything close to an occasional basis.) This is based on testimonials from former Valnet contributors, who spoke to The Wrap earlier this year, saying that Valnet’s modus operandi is to acquire a site, get rid of most of the staff, replace them with contributors for less money, and shift from publishing anything of substance to quick, easy, ubiquitous clickbait articles. One contributor is even suing Valnet, or he was in March when the Wrap article was written, anyway. And this is something that’s easily observable; whenever I click the “G” icon on my Google phone app, I get a bunch of article suggestions from some of these Valnet sites, and they’re all “Top 10 Whatever-The-Hell” about something I’m into or recently searched Google for, and they’re always either stupid, uninformed garbage or the most obvious things you can imagine. And, look, I don’t mind lists; I’ve written a few myself, and it’s foolish not to admit that they’re attractive to the eye, which translates to clicks. But I use the format as a way of discussing a broad range of topics about whatever show or movie I’m analyzing (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Rick and Morty, or villainy in the MCU, for example), and I try to go more in-depth than these other sites. It helps that I do this with things I am a fan of and have something to say about; pretty much every Buffy article I read on CBR or Collider gets lots of details wrong, which actual fans in the comments always point out. That’s what makes them clickbait, and it looks like they’re Valnet’s bread and butter.
It’s also a bad sign for gaming websites in general. Valnet is swallowing up as many as possible and turning them into mass-produced engagement farms, and many others are being sold or closed down. G/O Media Inc. sold The A.V. Club, Gizmodo, Jezebel, and The Onion in 2024, and while Gizmodo and The A.V. Club are still around, I haven’t heard much from Jezebel (not that I would, I guess), and I haven’t seen anything at all from The Onion recently. The picture this paints is that gaming media is on the wane, with the few sites left standing being turned into vapid time-killers rather than news or opinion publishers. Even Kotaku, on which many have been expecting the axe to drop for a while, is now focusing on gaming guides, something that resulted in their editor-in-chief quitting. We can talk about going broke as the logical result of going woke – and I don’t expect any of these acquired sites to stop going woke, as all of those clickbait articles love to tell me how “problematic” everything I love is – but I’m curious to see if this has any effect on video game developers and studios. One of the factors involved in gaming – and moviemaking, and pretty much all the arts – going woke is that they’re fed a line of nonsense by the entertainment media about how “the modern audience” demands the things we all hate, like identity politics and forced left-wing politics. Now, not only are many of these games bombing, and not only have gamers’ ire turned towards woke consulting firms like Sweet Baby Inc., but now, the very sites claiming to have their fingers on the pulse of the gaming community can’t keep their (figurative) doors open. Will studios finally get the message that they’ve been sold a bill of goods by gaming sites? We’ll see, and while my inclination is to doubt it will help, it definitely can’t hurt.
Let us know what you think of Valnet acquiring Polygon in the comments!
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