Polygon is not dead, but under new owner Valnet, it has been forcefully contorted into something it wasn’t even just a few weeks ago. Websites are their people; laying off the majority of a site’s staff is akin to molting skin and bones – and keeping only a name. So while Polygon persists, we still feel like now is an appropriate time to give former staff a chance to eulogize what was. Let’s join them in saying goodbye to an era.
Matt Leone, former special projects editor (2012-2025):
I spent a little over 13 years at Polygon, which I think was the longest uninterrupted stretch there of anyone apart from Chris Grant, who founded the site and was the primary reason it did so well for so long.
I wrote a longer thing about this on my personal site, but the thing I loved most about the job was we had enough bandwidth to chase projects we wanted to do, even if they weren’t always huge traffic wins. It was a big enough machine that we could spend a few months on a feature and justify that because it helped the site’s overall reputation/brand/etc., rather than because of some calculation that the time spent equaled the number of times people clicked on it. That changed a bit as time went on, but I’ll always be grateful to have worked for a place with that sort of flexibility, and to have worked for people who cared about the editorial and not just the numbers.
I’m also in the early stages of starting a new thing, so if the Aftermath folks don’t consider this too self-promotional and leave it in, follow @mattleone.bsky.social for updates!
Samit Sarkar, former deputy managing editor (2012-2025):
One of my favorite aspects of the Polygon that we all knew and loved — the Polygon that I worked at for just shy of 13 years — is that right up until the very end, it felt like we had a decent amount of freedom to just... try things. (I mean that as a whole, and for each person on staff.) If you look at the author page for pretty much anybody who was on our team, you're likely to find articles on a wide variety of topics in an assortment of formats, including some big swings, beat reporting, aborted projects, unhinged takes, low-hanging fruit, and wow-this-is-one-of-the-best-pieces-I've-read-in-ages stuff. The goal, above all else, was always to make cool shit. I think the work speaks for itself.
Polygon had been around long enough to be considered an institution, I'd say, but it wasn't a place that homogenized everything into an institutional voice. Instead, its output was a direct product of the particular people who were there — a reflection of the individual voices on the team, and their own backgrounds, quirks, hobbyhorses, and skill sets. Look, I'm not saying that we were immune from the pressures of late capitalism or mid-2020s web publishing; obviously, as a website operating at the scale we were operating at, we had to find a middle ground between complete editorial freedom and, well, the trend-/traffic-chasing strategies that the post-sale Polygon will likely rely on. It often felt like we were getting away with something.
Anyway: The thing that I will miss most about Polygon is, of course, the people. I loved working with the beautiful menagerie of humans who made Polygon what it was, particularly because I don't know that such an assemblage of people could've come together under any other circumstances at any other time or place. (Sure, I guess that's true of a lot of workplaces, but sue me — it feels more true to me about Polygon, especially now that so many of us are facing the prospect of having to find work elsewhere.)
It was a good website. I doubt I'll ever find a place like it for the rest of my career. So it goes.
Susana Polo, former senior entertainment writer (2015-2025):
With the caveat that there's no adequate way to sum up a decade in a few sentences... Polygon was the work, of course — hard and rewarding and exciting and just as importantly, often silly and creative. Some of the coolest stuff I've done in my life (my professional and non-professional life!) I got to do for Polygon. Polygon was also the people, talented and funny and kind and smart and dedicated and just as importantly often silly and sappy.
Polygon taught me what it was like to work for a place that understood my enthusiasm, expertise, and principles as something to be respected and valued, rather than exploited. It taught me what it's like not just to work with but to work for people who are smart and give a fuck about the work and the audience and importance of what we were doing and how we did it. That our jobs were not just to entertain or distract or mesmerize, but to inform and enrich, in a niche of a niche of an industry where it's so easy to lose that drive or get capitalistically crammed into a box with no room for it. Working at Polygon taught me that I should never settle for less than that, and it's probably the thing I'm most worried that I'll never find again.
Ryan Gilliam, former guides producer (2016-2025):
I grew up at Polygon. I was a watcher in college when the first Vox gaming documentary-style videos came out, I was a reader in my dorm room the day the website officially launched, and I was an employee of nearly a decade when the site — as we know it — died.
Working at Polygon is all I ever wanted to do, and I spent every day that I was there trying to honor the fact that I’d been given an opportunity to work at a dream job. It was challenging and frequently frustrating, but I learned from the most talented people out there, and I’m so unbelievably proud of not only the prestige work I was able to publish — like GOTY essays or reviews — but my day-to-day guides work as well.
Sometimes it’s tough to work in something fun like games, because when the world crumbles around you, it all starts to feel a little meaningless. But — stupid as it sounds — I always tried to tell myself that, with our guides, we were helping people enjoy their hobby a little more, and make their game time a little more relaxing. I wasn’t making a difference in my 9 to 5, but in my head, there were people who were making a difference who would come home and try to relax for a few hours before getting back out there. And in those moments of relaxation, they’d pull up a Polygon guide for Persona 5 classroom answers, or a walkthrough on how to get the latest Destiny Exotic. I don’t know if that ever happened, but the thought always made me smile.
Polygon was a good website. And it was a good home for the time we had it. I’ll miss it — and the people who made it Polygon — every day.
Clayton Ashley, former senior video editor (2016-2025):
Polygon wasn’t perfect, but what job is? And what gaming outlet would give me time and money to make a feature length documentary on the Cold War and a 1996 video game hardly anyone has heard of? Since 2018 at least, the video team was guided simply by our curiosity: we made videos about things that interested us, going down rabbit holes and interviewing smart people. I never expected to speak with art historians, city planners, folk musicians, or composers for my job at a video game website. We wanted to share what we’d learned with our audience with the same genuine excitement that you’d share that fact with your friends. I think, for the most part, we accomplished that.
I know I was incredibly lucky to have my role for nearly nine years (which is three times longer than anywhere else I’ve been). What I’ll miss most are the people I worked with: freakishly creative, hardworking, thoughtful, and kind. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel as collaborative and in sync as I did with my team at Polygon. We brainstormed ideas together, critiqued each other's scripts, and worked late into the night on charity livestreams. Even when we had sponsored videos we “had to” work on, the team made every effort to deliver something we felt good about and our audience would enjoy. It’s frustrating to know that our own success may have contributed to our fate, but I’ll always be proud of what we accomplished.
Cass Marshall, former games writer (2017-2025):
Polygon was a job, and it had all of the usual frustrations of a job, but it was my dream career nonetheless. I loved working with so many curious, insightful writers who were deeply invested in their beats. I got to work with some of the sharpest and most thoughtful editors in the business, and they helped hone my craft. I'm incredibly grateful I had the chance to work with these people every day. I talked to tons of devs and had great conversations. We got to cover indie games, and our own personal passions, and stuff that wasn't solely based on chasing traffic numbers.
I'm devastated to be moving on; I'll miss getting to write deeply silly pieces and tossing ideas back and forth with the team. I would have stayed for as long as the site existed and my best wishes are with those who remain under Valnet. Polyon forever. Solidarity forever.
Petrana Radulovic, former entertainment reporter (2018-2025):
At Polygon, I wanted to cover the things I loved in the same way I would gush about them over Tumblr and with my friends. And I also wanted to branch out our coverage, let people know that there are huge, thriving, unabashedly geeky fandoms for stuff like Jane Austen, romantic comedies, and visual novel mobile games — stuff that usually doesn’t get a place in mainstream geek coverage.
Sometimes that meant being silly. Sometimes that meant being serious. Sometimes that meant taking a very silly thing very seriously. I’m thankful for all the editors that let me infuse my voice into my writing and helped me shape what that voice was, and for all the writers I got to work with, who inspired me every day. Polygon really embraced that individuality and let writers’ voices and perspectives shine and I’m just really happy I got to be a part of that and help mold it into a truly special space.
Andrew Melnizek, former general manager (2018-2025):
There are so many memories from my time at Polygon that I’ll carry with me. But more than any specific feature, video, cultural analysis, or special package we created as a team, what I’ll remember most is how we challenged the conversation -- not just within games, but across the broader entertainment culture. We didn’t just push the conversation forward, we worked to guide and welcome new audiences into the communities we loved most.
As General Manager on the business side of Polygon, my main responsibility was to help drive that conversation in innovative ways with partners and advertisers -- challenging the status quo and correcting misconceptions held by some of the world’s largest consumer brands and their leadership about the gaming community at large. I often found myself explaining that this is where mainstream culture is born. So many trends start within gaming communities, gain momentum, and eventually become the norm.
In my parting note to the team, I thanked them for creatively inspiring me every day and for helping me grow -- not only as an executive in the media industry but also personally, from so many different angles. And at its core, that’s what Polygon has always been about: the many angles of the medium and communities we love so deeply.
Nicole Carpenter, former senior reporter (2019-2025):
I’ve had a lot of weird jobs. I worked as a baker in a vegan diner. I walked dogs in a ritzy Boston neighborhood. Tweaked layouts of boring technical manuals. I didn’t know what I wanted to do as a profession for a very long time. I started college in my early-to-mid-20s and started thinking about what it’d be like to be a journalist after I got involved in my college’s paper. Polygon had been founded shortly before. I took a digital media course, and we were instructed to write as if we worked for a specific outlet of our choosing. Mine was Polygon.
All this is to say, Polygon was my dream job. I wanted to write for a publication that allowed me to be curious, thoughtful, compassionate, and meticulous in my reporting. It felt like there was space for writing I wouldn’t find elsewhere. And, thanks to the Vox Media Union, I was compensated fairly for it. It’s a place where every day I was awed by the work my coworkers were doing. You could come to Polygon and find work that no one else was doing, whether it’s culture reporting on Roblox, rigorous analysis of a ride at Disney, or a hilarious blog about a big dumb horse. I’m still in shock they laid us all off.
I’m the writer and reporter I am because of my colleagues at Polygon. I keep reminding myself that; Polygon isn’t responsible for all the incredible work we did, how much we grew together and independently. We’re the reason. We’re the reason Polygon’s work was so celebrated. Yet, what’s happened is still devastating. It’s thrown dozens of people’s lives into chaos. I’m scared. I’m sure a lot of us are. There is a bright spot in all of this, and that’s knowing my colleagues have my back, as I have theirs. The Vox Media Union has been incredible in this transition, too. The GoFundMe really, really touched me. It’s helped me realize just how much people care about us and our work. It’s really nice.
Toussaint Egan, former curation editor (2021-2025):
I worked at Polygon for over four and a half years. It was my first staff job at a major publication after over six years of freelancing, and my first real job coming out of grad school. I received my spoken job offer on the day of my final interview, which just so happened to be the day of the Capitol riot.
For all these reasons and more, my time with Polygon will always mark a very special and important chapter in my career and my life. Every job has its ups and downs — that's the nature of all employment — but for a time, my time as an associate curation editor and later curation editor proper for the site was the best job I ever had. I will miss my time there, but I’m ready to move on. My only regret was that it had to end this way.
It’s difficult for me to encapsulate all the work that I'm most proud of over the past four years. I flew to Japan to cover the Crunchyroll Anime Awards; I interviewed Michael B. Jordan, Megan thee Stallion, and Joaquim Dos Santos, the co-director of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse; I curated an annual, month-long, Halloween-themed marathon of horror movies, TV, and media that became one of the site’s biggest traffic-driving tentpoles. All the while, I grew as a writer, an editor, and as a person.
In what would turn out to be my last month at Polygon, I interviewed Shinichirō Watanabe, Kazuya Tsurumaki, Flying Lotus (for the third time in my career!), and Bonobo, one of my all-time favorite electronic musicians. All of which is to say that: If I had to be laid off at any point in my time at Polygon, I'm proud that it was this month, because I know in my heart of hearts that I blew the hinges off the door on my way out. In true Spike Spiegel fashion, I ended things off with a bang.
If you were to ask me, right this instant, what I'm most proud of, it's the connections and friendships I made between peers, freelance colleagues, and industry professionals who reached out personally to offer their condolences, as well as the myriad of artists and creators who trusted me with their stories over the past four years. For that, I am eternally humbled and forever thankful. This is the end of a chapter, but it is far from the end of my journey. I look forward to writing and sharing more stories with readers in the months ahead as I move into what I call the “Luthen Rael/Cayce Pollard” era of my career. As the Axis spymaster of the Rebel Alliance once said, “I have friends everywhere.” The motto, as always, is onward and upward.
Ana Diaz, former culture writer (2021-2025):
When I was 13 I ran a modestly popular Nintendo blog on Tumblr dedicated to sharing cutesy and goofy edited screenshots and gifs of series like Pokémon and The Legend of Zelda. I am still very proud of the success of that blog and can trace certain reaction gifs of Link now linked on chatting apps back to that same blog. However, I gave it up after a high school counselor told me it wouldn’t help me or my future at college.
In the classic way that narrow-minded authority figures can be, that counselor was wrong and I never knew that person was more wrong when I started work at Polygon.
To me, Polygon was an inherent recognition of what I felt all along: That video games, the people who make them, and the fandoms they inspire are important and worthy of being examined in writing. Suddenly when I was at Polygon, I was surrounded by people who felt the same. There was literally no other place I wanted to write for, because I knew my interests wouldn’t be otherized or seen as niche at Polygon. I got to write about weebs in Barnes & Noble and read about video game unions, beloved failures in animation, and use the site to check chest locations in Honkai: Star Rail.
Ultimately, I can’t capture what Polygon means to me in a matter of a few paragraphs. In a sense, I felt like I “grew up” there. My writing has improved so tremendously under the direction of editors like Nicole Clark, Maddy Myers, Zosha Millman, and Kallie Plagge. But as growing up often is, working at Polygon also came with its own pains.
I cared deeply about my colleagues and the work, and it was easy to get a bit too riled up, or at times, not riled up enough. Also, writing all the time is hard. I am pretty sure that I will go down in history as Polygon’s slowest news writer. (McWhertor, if you’re reading this just know that I tried my best.) I, like many writers, dealt with a plucking anxiety pang that told me I was not good enough, an anxiety that Chris Plante tried to swat away like a fly at every single one-on-one we ever had.
With time, I didn’t age like a fine wine but more like some juice that gained a bit of fizz after being opened and sitting too long in the back of the fridge. For me, Polygon (at its best) was a bubbly site that allowed us to have a bit of fun, and I for one will choose to remember it as the place where I got to write about a Mario cum pipe meme.
Kallie Plagge, former senior copy editor (2022-2025):
Work shouldn’t be your whole life, but honestly, Polygon was where I felt most like myself. I’m a very in-the-weeds kind of person, and having hyper-specific knowledge about very niche things was sort of the whole job. Copy editing, in terms of checking a piece of writing for spelling and grammar and style (and sensitivity), was one part of that; the other part was being able to catch an error simply because I happened to know a Pokémon fact off the top of my head, or because I know to check whether a particular Fire Emblem Heroes character is actually new or if they first appeared in a game that was never officially localized into English.
This… quality? skill? flaw? doesn’t always come across well to people, even though it’s more about liking knowledge than simply Wanting to Be Right. But I really felt like my friends and colleagues at Polygon truly valued what I had to offer in service of making each piece the best it could be, and ensuring readers could focus on what we had to say instead of nitpicking any one detail or turn of phrase. If just one person felt better about publishing a big story or vulnerable piece knowing I’d looked it over with that very specific fine-toothed comb, then I could feel good about myself and my contribution to the team.
But more importantly, I got to learn new things every day from people who were equally passionate and knowledgeable about equally niche stuff. I got to have fun, in-the-weeds conversations every day with people who understood why I liked having them, and whose skills and work I really respect. I’m leaving Polygon more confident in myself than when I started, and it’s largely thanks to the relationships I developed there (and especially to Samit, the best manager I could’ve asked for). I get to keep the friends I made at Polygon, of course — but I’m just really, really sad I don’t get to work with them every day anymore.
Pete Volk, former senior curation editor (2022-2025):
I was a fan of Polygon long before I worked there. I started my career covering sports at Polygon’s sister site SB Nation. During my nearly 10 years at SB Nation, Polygon was the only other Vox Media website I read regularly, because the personality of the people who worked there jumped off the page. Before I got to work with them, I loved reading Petrana Radulovic and Maddy Myers and Nicole Carpenter and whatever Cass Marshall was getting up to on any particular day (and so many other people!), and I loved the excellent video team and their approach. There was so much on Polygon that made me laugh, but that was all alongside important reporting work and stories that made me a more informed reader and participant in the culture.
That’s why I targeted Polygon as my next spot after SB Nation, and I am so grateful I was able to work there for more than three years. As the lead of our curation section, I tried to embrace the curiosity and light tone that made Polygon such an appealing destination for me, introducing people to movies, TV shows, or games they might never have heard of in ways that gave them proper context around the title and hopefully made them laugh a little.
And I was grateful for the opportunity to take big swings on stories that I felt passionate about, like this piece I worked with a group of excellent freelancers on about the Black action star pantheon, or the oral history I wrote on DTV action masterpiece Blood and Bone. Blood and Bone is one of my favorite movies of all time, but not exactly one that felt like a perfect fit for Polygon’s audience – nevertheless, I was able to make time to report that story for more than a year. At its best, Polygon encouraged the people who worked there to embrace what they were passionate about, and share that passion with the audience – during my time with the site, I was able to cover action movies, esports, and sports games: all passions of mine, even though they rarely intersected with my actual job.
I’m proud of the work I did there and the skills I honed, but what I’m really going to miss is the people I worked with, who I learned so much from and made me better every day. There was a real sense of camaraderie among the people that created the stories that made Polygon what it was, and while I know the friendships I made there will last, I will miss the environment that put us all together, and I can’t help but be bitter that success couldn’t save us from the vultures who seem to make every important decision in our society these days.
I’m particularly grateful for the time I was able to spend with the great people on the curation team: Toussaint Egan, Austen Goslin, and (briefly) Nicole Clark, who are all so dedicated and talented and made coming to work every day a treat. And I will deeply miss the Vox Media Union – being a part of the original organizing and bargaining committees is the thing I’m most proud of during my time at the company. The relationships forged in that fire will last a lifetime, and the gains we made in that negotiation mean that I and my other former co-workers received more severance than the company would have ever given us on its own accord.
