The road ahead

Chris Grant, Polygon’s editor-in-chief:

This month, we lost some of our team. This includes Russ Pitts, one of the founding editors of the site, along with Tom Connors and Adam Barenblat, two of the most talented and hardest-working people we had. These decisions are never easy, and Russ, Tom and Adam are people I have considered, and will still consider, friends.

We never thought starting a video game outlet in 2012 (has it been that long already?) was going to be easy and we’ve learned a lot in the last two years. We learned that there’s an incredible opportunity to tell in-depth stories about the people — both fans and creators — that make video games what they are. But we’ve also learned exactly how hard it is to do that with consistency and how much appetite there is for that kind of coverage.

We’re very proud of the feature writing and video work we’ve done, but producing that content is expensive and requires that all (or at least nearly all) of those pieces are smash hits. When you’re publishing two to three pieces like that a week, bringing in the audiences day in and day out is tougher than we’d imagined it would be way back in 2012. Lesson learned.

Will Polygon still make incredible features? We absolutely will. What will change is the frequency.

As previously stated, Pitts is a hell of a writer. As for Connors and Barenblat, their work inspired me to revisit my dreams of working in film and became the hook for my fondness of Polygon. I’d have happily paid for any of their features.