#313: Bomb disposal

Yesterday the highly regarded games website Polygon was sold by Vox Media to Valnet, a former online p0rn company that these days owns a sprawling network of websites specialising, according to one former staffer speaking to The Wrap a couple of months ago, in “paying bargain-basement rates and forcing contractors to create junky clickbait.” They may no longer run Brazzers, in other words, but they are still clearly a bunch of wankers. Elsewhere, there have been layoffs at Giant Bomb after parent company Fandom instilled new ‘brand safety’ guidelines designed to turn what has always been a terrifically sweary media operation into a PG-13 one, and ordered that the mix of livestreams, podcasts and gameplay videos on which the site built its reputation be abandoned, and just do game guides instead. Give me strength.

The list of people freshly out of work reads like a who’s who of modern US games media, and includes a number of Hit Points chums. Obviously it’s been a brutal couple of years for the games press, as it has been for the game industry itself. But this week’s news has hit a little different, and not just because both stories broke within a few hours of each other, a sort of one-two punch of rank stupidity and abject cruelty. 

It is impossible to overstate how hard it is for a games website to stand out from the crowd. They all cover the same stories, go to the same events and review the same games, at pretty much the same time. But throughout my time on Edge, sniffy as I was about the disposable nature of online media, both Polygon and Giant Bomb stood out, and earned my respect. Admittedly it took Polygon a while. It launched with a certain attitude, exemplified by a laughably high-falutin' 13-part documentary series in which they promised to fix a broken this and that, and while I don’t think they ever really achieved those unlikely goals they certainly gave it a pretty good shake. I remember the Edge team cooing while scrolling through their review of the PlayStation 4, with its magazine-ish layout, funky illustrations and cool interactive elements (most of which appear to have been lost to redesigns over the years, which is rather telling, in a completely miserable sort of way). I felt a sort of common ground with Polygon back then; they were trying to do things differently, prizing quality above all, and quite relaxed if people thought it all a bit dickish of them. Kindred spirits really. They were probably always on a hiding to nothing, given the way the web works, but you had to respect the intent.

Giant Bomb, meanwhile, was if anything the polar opposite to Edge. While we were beavering away in the shadows, writing to a decades-old house style beneath our shroud of anonymity, the Giant Bomb crew were all about putting themselves out there, putting personalities front and centre. They made the first commercial games website to properly understand video, embracing and in many ways defining the form while their peers were still either struggling with it, or pretending it didn't exist. Their Quick Looks were terrific, their E3 and game-of-the-year podcasts unmissable. I listened to their weekly podcast religiously long before I became a game journalist, and continued for some while after. I cried the day Ryan Davis died; I felt like I’d lost a friend.

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. When Valnet realises you can’t run a website like Polygon by paying freelancers $30 per article, no doubt it will become another Screenrant or CBR, flooding the zone with search-optimised shit as Polygon’s founding goals become an ever-more distant, and absurd, memory. 

The thing is, if you'd asked me at the start of this week to sketch out a sustainable future for the games media, it would probably have looked a bit like Giant Bomb and Polygon. Those of us who have gone independent over the years and found a reasonable measure of success have done it by offering something a little different than the big commercial websites — narrowing the beat, rather than trying to cover everything; working for ourselves and our audiences, rather than some unknowable, ever-changing algorithm — and frequently by making our personalities a significant part of our work. No doubt a number of the excellent writers, presenters and podcasters who lost their jobs this week will soon find new success doing their own version of this on Patreon, or YouTube, or a newsletter platform, but this doesn’t have to be a small, independent thing. Both Polygon and Giant Bomb spent years proving that it’s perfectly viable to do it at a commercial scale. You just need owners who are prepared to take the chance, and to accept the prospect of a lower return. Clearly, as the corporate internet swirls ever closer to the drain, only exponential growth, achieved on a shoestring budget, is good enough. I wish the dumbass fuckbrains who signed off on this week’s decisions all the best on their fruitless quest. I look forward to watching them fail.

MORE!

• Rockstar has this afternoon delayed the release of Grand Theft Auto VI until May 26, 2026. “We need this extra time to deliver at the level of quality you expect and deserve,” the studio honked on not-Twitter. While I’ve still got my games media hat on, this will put an enormous dent in traffic projections for the rest of the year and probably means even more layoffs are in the pipe. But I'm sure every other company with a game coming out in 2025 is popping corks now they know they've got the rest of the year to themselves, and need no longer fear the juggernaut.
• Microsoft has hiked the global price of Xbox Series consoles and certain accessories, and confirmed it will raise the price of new firstparty games to $80 later this year. It means a Series X now costs $600, while the ‘Galaxy Black’ edition, which comes with a 2TB hard drive and a 'fancy' plastic wrap, is now more expensive than a PS5 Pro (!). You’d have thought that, if there was any company able to weather the twin storms of global inflation and tariff mania, and avoid passing higher costs onto consumers, it’d be the one that made $135bn in profit last year, but I guess not. Well done, lads. Sure this’ll turn those miserable sales around in no time.
• EA has laid off 100 staff at Respawn, cancelled two of its projects, and made 300 further layoffs around the business “in service of driving future growth”, according to an anonymous EA spokesperson I would like to see step on a nail. For pity's sake. They’re your one good studio, leave them alone.
• Tim Sweeney has spent the week gleefully showing off his repertoire of Fortnite dances after a US judge kicked seven shades of shinola out of Apple for ignoring previous court orders and fucking about with App Store payment systems. Sweeney stopped flossing momentarily to offer Apple a deal: drop its nefarious policies worldwide and Epic will put Fortnite back on the App Store immediately, then drop all current litigation. Apple says it will appeal, but in the meantime has updated App Store guidelines to comply with the ruling.
• Codemasters will no longer make rally games following the end of its licensing deal with World Rally Championship. The UK studio, which was bought by EA in 2021, has a rich lineage in the genre dating back to 1998’s Colin McRae Rally. “We’ve provided a home for every rally enthusiast,” the studio blubbed, “striving tirelessly to push the boundaries.”
• The Russian government is trying to seize control of Lesta Studios, developer of free-to-play juggernaut World Of Tanks, because of its former owner Wargaming’s support for Ukraine. Cripes!

Bleurgh, what a week. Let’s leave it there, get out in the sun and look at some plants or something. Free readers who have got this far and have presumably therefore enjoyed themselves: chuck us a sub, eh? Have a lovely weekend!