Well! A one-week Sunday Papers break turned into three, prompted by the seemingly endless school holiday at Easter. Now I return and– Monday is another holiday? Blimey. Nevertheless, let’s do some links.
Polygon, one of the last video game outlets with a reputation for long form reporting and feature writing, was sold to Valnet, a content farm best known for paying writers terribly and being founded by porn peddlers. Most of the staff were immediately fired. Local arsonist believes smouldering rubble has “a lot of potential and could be much more.”
On the same day, Giant Bomb exploded, shedding staff and pausing content production pending a “strategic reset”. Word is that owners Fandom want them to stop producing personality-led livestreams and video content – y’know, the reason anyone likes Giant Bomb – and instead pivot to guides.
All of which felt worth noting here, in the corner of RPS where we typically write about writing. It’s also context for the following series of links, beginning with Nathan Brown’s sensibly outraged response.
This is about more, I think, than the apparent, if not necessarily imminent, death of two well-loved websites. Nor is it merely another tale about the ceaseless ignorance of today’s media conglomerates. More than anything else it is about the death of difference, of innovation, of trying to find new routes to success instead of fighting with everyone else for the same handful of scraps. If Fandom follows through on its designs to turn Giant Bomb into a guides site then arguably the most singular website the games media has ever known will become like all the rest, joining all the other flotsam and jetsam on their endless, pointless churn in the tide of search.
Someone also put together a list of independent games media worth supporting, as well as places you can support now-former Polygon staff.
If you want to understand what made Polygon a great website, you could do worse than read Nicole Carpenter’s 2023 piece on “the untold history of Barbie Fashion Designer, the first mass-market ‘game for girls'”:
Mattel sold more than 1 million copies of Barbie Fashion Designer by 1998, a couple years after its initial release, according to Billboard numbers from 1998. The game topped charts and outsold several games considered to be for boys, like Quake.
Or, for that matter, their primer on video game unions, also by Carpenter.
It is harder than ever to make a video games website successful – although, it must be said, corporate owners are as craven and shortsighted as they’ve always been.
Here’s a thought experiment: what if we made advertising illegal? (sign-up required).
I think there’s a world where w