By Nelson Schneider - 05/04/25 at 05:26 PM CT
News broke this past week that the second-worst site for gaming news, reviews, and information, Polygon, had been sold by parent company Vox Media, and faces a 20% staff layoff and potential shuttering in the near future. The new owner is Valnet, an Arab-owned Canadian media conglomerate known widely for its low-quality content and contentious click-bait headlines… so Polygon should fit right in!
As the Big Tech monopolies continue to consolidate their power with the help of AI driven tools, it seems that traditional media, new media, and even social media no longer have a relevant place in the journalism landscape. Where Google used to give small sites the ability to support themselves and even grow into big sites through its reasonable – or even generous – advertising rates, that has changed over the years to the point where the only way for news sites – of any kind, not just gaming-related or nerd-related – to keep the lights on is to charge a subscription or get venture capital funds from “somewhere” else. Compounding woe upon woe, venture capitalists have figured out that there’s no money to be made in journalism – especially biased, Activist Journalism that pisses of half the audience instead of even trying to be “neutral” – and have been divesting themselves of sites at the same time that the staff on these journalism sites jump ship in the face of cratering wages and unrealistic expectations.
It’s not all doom and gloom, however. It seems that in the collapse of the New Media Empire, the truly independent journalists, who would cover a topic regardless of the profit in it simply because they are deeply interested in the topic itself, are finding their voices once again. Far from finding value in idealogically-comprised sites that all push the same narrative at the expense of their hobbies, nerds of all stripes are turning to their fellow nerds for information, with independent YouTubers typically holding much higher subscriber numbers and better viewership than the establishment outlets.
What will be the ultimate outcome? Will nerd hobbies once again be siloed into nerd-specific channels instead facing corruption through mainstream pandering? Will new, trustworthy, interest-driven (not Activism-driven) sites rise from the ashes, manned by crews who truly care about the topics they cover instead of trying to use their platforms for evangelizing and talking down to the people they claim to serve? I don’t know the answers to those questions, but as someone who has been unable to read sites like Polygon and Kotaku for well over a decade without feeling nauseated and pissed off, all I can say is that whatever happens, it will almost definitely be better than the mill we’ve been put through already.
