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Polygon sold to Valnet with no notice, most staff laid off

lincolnic

lincolnic

can stop, will stop
(he/him)
This sucks.

Valnet, for those who weren't aware, is the content mill behind sites like Screen Rant, Game Rant, and other SEO-focused garbage you see any time you search the internet for anything about a video game.

Polygon was, against all odds, a pretty consistently solid source of news and writing about not only video games, but adjacent forms of media too. I can't really think of another website that fills the same niche in 2025 (but if you can, I'd love to hear about it). Who else is left? Kotaku is still going, and I still read it, but they've gone a bit downhill in recent years thanks to the fuckery of their parent company.

Another sacrifice of journalism on the altar of Content.
 
Giant Bomb is also exploding

Lk2glOW.png


kotaku.com

Fandom Blows Up Giant Bomb

A cornerstone of gaming is in shambles following interference from the wiki farm
kotaku.com kotaku.com
 
Party Mode Games sells out to the highest bidder, they scrub everything that people came for, people leave, rinse, repeat.

I had my fill of this garbage when USgamer was shut down, and haven't followed any gaming news sites regularly since, but this still sucks to see.
 
A dark day for games journalism, it's not getting any better for this industry
 
Game sites have been irrelevant for a decade, at least. Giantbomb was a lot of fun, then nearly everybody left to start a new thing I have never heard anything from since. I hope these folks have something more stable coming their way soon.

YouTubers have taken over the gaming discourse scene, with wildly varying results. There aren’t even any good general video game podcasts anymore.
 
I'm not even interested in "discourse" per se, it just sucks to lose another centralized location for news about media I'm interested in. Where do you even get video game news from otherwise?
 
I subscribe to Patch magazine, which is $10 a month for a small publication that may not have a lot of coverage but always has lots of cute things. It's short and not super in depth, and due to being shipped from the UK I'm not getting it until a couple

A couple months ago GameInformer staff bought the publication back and announced they reunited. They have been doing articles and you can go through their archived issues too!

I also follow the newsletters of things I like, Wholesome games just sent one so that's fresh on my mind but there are a couple studio or themed newsletters I follow too.

I don't follow Nintendo Life as I haven't been playing many Nintendo games recently but I think a couple people on here work there or contribute?

Separate from gaming news, I continue to use GameFAQs for guides as much as possible as you can't trust AI slop. But when it's something that needs a video guide I'm definitely at the mercy of Google and trying to avoid ones with Vtubers, but that's what mute buttons are for. Some of IGN's guides have helpful info but they are often hard to navigate and give my adblocker a run for it's money.
 
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When I want a dose of "what's going on in games rn" I hit up RockPaperShotgun. Is that one secretly awful some way? 😅
 
Oh yes, I've heard of that one too. I'm not on social media enough to keep track of what to hate honestly so who knows, ha.
 
Oh fuck. I did not know. That sucks. Remap maybe? Though they don't do a lot of news. Mostly the podcast and streaming.
 
Violentvixen said:
I subscribe to Patch magazine, which is $10 a month for a small publication that may not have a lot of coverage but always has lots of cute things. It's short and not super in depth, and due to being shipped from the UK I'm not getting it until a couple

A couple months ago GameInformer staff bought the publication back and announced they reunited. They have been doing articles and you can go through their archived issues too!

I also follow the newsletters of things I like, Wholesome games just sent one so that's fresh on my mind but there are a couple studio or themed newsletters I follow too.

I don't follow Nintendo Life as I haven't been playing many Nintendo games recently but I think a couple people on here work there or contribute?

Separate from gaming news, I continue to use GameFAQs for guides as much as possible as you can't trust AI slop. But when it's something that needs a video guide I'm definitely at the mercy of Google and trying to avoid ones with Vtubers, but that's what mute buttons are for. Some of IGN's guides have helpful info but they are often hard to navigate and give my adblocker a run for it's money.
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Falselogic said:
Oh fuck. I did not know. That sucks. Remap maybe? Though they don't do a lot of news. Mostly the podcast and streaming.
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I appreciate the suggestions, but none of these are really what I'm after - I just want to go to a website and read a couple of articles. Sadly it seems like the kind of website that Polygon was (and Kotaku still tries hard to be) is going the way of the dodo.

I also don't know anything about RockPaperShotgun other that their parent company is also owned by IGN.
 
Maybe Noisy Pixel? I'm not an active reader but do follow one of their writers on bluesky and they seem pretty good, or at least very much not-bad.
 
q 3 said:
Maybe Noisy Pixel? I'm not an active reader but do follow one of their writers on bluesky and they seem pretty good, or at least very much not-bad.
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That's close, but scrolling down the front page one of the articles I saw was "Top Ten Waifus of the Tales Series", and that was enough to turn me around.
 
I was going to mention that I hear Nintendo Force magazine is pretty good, but if you're looking specifically for websites, maybe not so much.
 
Rock Paper Shotgun is my go-to for PC gaming news, and has been for years. I haven’t noticed that their editorial voice has changed at all due to being bought by IGN or whoever. For console games, I tend to read Eurogamer.
 
It sucks for all the people involved here, and watching a solid career/industry get hollowed out on the altar of vulture capitalism. This probably would have upset me deeply ten years ago. These days though, my interest in "news" about gaming is below water. You guys, and an old discord of friends are probably the closest thing I've got to gaming "news". That and Reddit I suppose.
 
Pretty much the only one I've ever paid attention to in recent years is Nintendo Life, which I love, even if do still have to click away from any video that begins with "hhhhhHELlo there, lovely peeeeeople" because I can't do it, man, I just can't

On a similar note, Time Extension is a pretty good resource for retro stuff
 
They literally finalized the deal shortly before announcing it, so the footer is outdated and will likely be fixing it this week.
 
So in a weird turn of events, Polygon actually seems to still be pretty much the same as it was before the sale. I still recognize a bunch of the names in the bylines and the actual format or content doesn't seem to have changed. Obviously it's still relatively early and this could change at any time, but I was expecting the site to become very icky very fast, and that just hasn't happened yet.
 
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