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| Could this be the end of Polygon as we know it? |
Earlier this month, the second largest game publication Polygon has just lost more than two thirds of its writing staff, and nearly every editor on the payroll.
This comes after the owners of the gaming publication, Vox Media, sold the website to Valnet for some undisclosed amount of money.
The overwhelming majority of staff laid off from Polygon's writing team were members of the Vox Media union, and included the entire union negotiating team, according to PC Gamer.
Many editors and writing staff took to sites like Bluesky to collectively air their grievances, as well as beg for jobs. Among the casualties was Polygon Co-founder and CEO Chris Plante.
I'm no longer with Polygon. If you're hiring, please consider the many talented writers and editors now on the market. Every one of them deserves a spot on your staff. I won't be talking more about the sale because I wasn't involved. Going to hang out with my kid. Taking wins where I can.
— Chris Plante (@plante.bsky.social) May 1, 2025 at 11:25 AM
The Canadian umbrella company Valnet already owns the vast majority of gaming news and review sites, including TheGamer, HardCore Gamer, Gamerant, FextraLife, and Opencritic, but the corporation's reach extends even further; owning a near virtual monopoly on websites that review movies and comic books, including CBR (Comic Book Reader) and MovieWeb, just to name a few.
Even more concerning than the layoffs is Valnet's less-than-stellar reputation among readers. According to a bombshell investigative report by media watchdog TheWrap, many current -and former- employees are accusing the company of transforming great websites into "click farms," turning many of the journalistic pieces into content mills to farm ad revenue. The piece detailed what many of the company's workers called a content 'sweatshop,' where employees were expected to push out an unreasonable amount of content, irrespective of quality and relevant in information.
The sentiment among the general public isn't much better. In the Reddit thread covering this story alone, many are blaming Valnet as one of the culprits behind the 'enshitification' of the internet, accusing most Gaming news sites of looking -and reading- the same.
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Valnet and its CEO pushed back on these allegations with a lengthy lawsuit, targeting TheWrap, accusing the investigative piece of being defamatory, and completely untrue. The lawsuit seeks a staggering 64.5 million in damages, citing personal harm the piece caused to CEO Hassan Yousef's reputation, causing emotional distress, as well as effecting the company's bottom line.
Even more impactful than Valnet's growing monopoly on video game news is the wider implications this buyout has on gaming media. This purchase comes mere weeks after Fandom sold Giant Bomb to its employees, and the resurrection of GameInformer. The gaming news industry has been taking Ls everywhere you look, and with the looming threat of AI large language models that already read like most of these writers, the future of written gaming news looks very unstable.
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