’The people of Polygon deserved better’

Grayson Morley on his Backlog newsletter:

I’m a fiction writer who wandered into games criticism. I say “wandered,” but the truth is, I got some serious help early on from Chris Plante, former editor-in-chief of Polygon. When I was a nobody, and not, as I am now, nearly nobody, Plante hopped on a Zoom call with me when I was between jobs, trying to see whether I could pivot into doing some games writing. Our correspondence up until that point had been mostly me emailing him about my short story, “Brent, Bandit King,” which had won an award and was based on an article he’d written at the time for The Verge. Let me be perfectly frank: Very few people on this earth would email back a random stranger telling them they wrote a short story based on an article they wrote. Plante did. And not only that, but he offered sage advice to me when I was first getting Backlog going, a kindness for which I have no way of repaying him.

Besides Plante, I owe a lot to current and former Polygon folks like Mike Mahardy, Maddy Myers, and Matt Leone for their edits and guidance. But before I was a contributor, I was a Polygon reader, and that’s the part of me that’s mourning right now. For me, Polygon was my absolute favorite place to read about games, both on the reportorial side, thanks to powerhouses like Nicole Carpenter, and especially on the critical front, with its variety of voices, both in-house and freelance, who offered fresh takes on the art form I so love. For that to be more or less gone this morning is incredibly sad.

I don’t have a radical take to propose today besides to say that you should follow these writers wherever they go. People make the publication, and not the other way around, and when the business side loses track of that, we all suffer. I fear there will never be another Polygon, and as someone who cares about this medium, that’s a hard pill to swallow. The people of Polygon deserved better. The readers of Polygon deserved better. The industry deserved better.

I echo Morley’s sentiments. I’ve had the great fortune of meeting and befriending a handful of folks from Polygon over the years. Their empathy, care, wit, and insight only made me want to be part of their team even more. Some incredibly bright and dedicated individuals that certainly deserved better.