Short answers, pulled from the story.
Polygon launched on the 24th of October 2012, as Vox Media's third property. The site was built over ten months by eight co-founding editors drawn from rival gaming outlets including Joystiq, Kotaku, and The Escapist.
Christopher Grant, former editor-in-chief of Joystiq, co-founded Polygon with Brian Crecente from Kotaku and Russ Pitts from The Escapist, among others. The site aimed to combine competition with top gaming sites like GameSpot and IGN with longform magazine-style journalism focused on the people behind video games.
Starting in September 2018, Polygon dropped numerical review scores to give reviewers more freedom in how they evaluated games. Scores were replaced with a "Polygon Recommends" designation for games a reviewer could fully endorse, with top picks forming the basis of a "Polygon Essentials" list.
Valnet purchased Polygon from Vox Media in May 2025. At the time of the sale, Vox laid off most of Polygon's staff; a former employee told Aftermath that at least 25 people had been let go, many of them union members. Valnet retained about ten staff and said it planned to grow the team.
VentureBeat criticized Polygon in 2014 for accepting $750,000 in sponsorship from Microsoft to produce its founding documentary Press Reset. The site also drew criticism for a low review score given to The Last of Us in 2013 and for a widely ridiculed Doom gameplay video published in May 2016.
Polygon Recommends is a designation introduced in September 2018, replacing scored reviews. A reviewer awards it to a game they can stand behind after playing enough to make a firm judgment. Games that earn this designation become eligible for inclusion in Polygon Essentials, the site's curated list of must-play titles.