THE sale of Polygon to a Canadian pornographer last year, some on the popular gaming site may have felt like they were NPCs in a Hitman level. A parade of NDAs hinted to some staff that a worrying change in ownership would occur in the coming days, but no one knew who else knew, or the full details of what the sale would entail.
“I didn’t know how many people were under NDA” Polygonformer deputy editor-in-chief Maddy Myers recently told me (full disclosure: Myers was also previously the deputy editor of My city). “I didn’t know who knew and who didn’t, and I didn’t know that everyone who wasn’t on an NDA wasn’t going to get in. But it seemed suspicious, because I was like, I know not everyone knows about the sale. I don’t know why some people are informed in advance. It seems fishy to me, and it was a shady and strange time.
Valnet, the click farm that ended up buying Polygon of Jim Bankoff’s Vox Media for an undisclosed amount, ended up laying off most of its staff, including all of its union employees. The site was completely uprooted overnight as the new owners rushed a team of underpaid freelancers to immediately begin producing new articles.
“They basically told us just enough to make us feel like it was our only option to come,” said Zoë Hannah, Polygonthe former game publisher. “The way I’ve described it since is that I feel like we were both used as bargaining chips for this sale. They really wanted the managers to come in so they could get to work with these contractors that they had already lined up, we found out later.”
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Myers and Hannah were spared while more than 30 of their colleagues were made redundant, but remaining on site was untenable. “It was about a week and a half later that I realized that, okay, yeah, this, this wasn’t going to work for me,” Myers said. “Personally, I’m really depressed about how many people have left. I don’t feel good about replacing them. It was really like my personal emotional state at that time, I was like, I need a reset.”
Hannah confronted Vox HR after the sale, claiming she felt misled during the preparation. “I told them it was in bad faith, I feel like I wasn’t given any options here.” She said the weeks that followed led to more disillusionment with the situation, describing her final month on the site as “kicking and screaming”. Myers and Hannah eventually left Polygon in June.
They could have tried to find other jobs in digital gaming media or, as is becoming increasingly common for experienced talent, abandon that field altogether. Instead, they decided to create their own video game website. It would analyze games specifically through the lens of gender and identity at a time when these perspectives have been crowded out from other media under the pressure of the total homogenization algorithm. It would belong to them and could therefore never be sold under their responsibility. It would be called Mothership.
Mothership = Teen Vogue but for video games “It is Teen Voguebut for video games, a somewhat bittersweet pitch now that Teen Vogue has been completely empty”, Myers said. “I feel like that’s part of the field as well. It’s like what THE Mary Sue That used to be the case, but what if there was no need to publish dozens and dozens of articles per day, what if there were fewer articles per day and what if there were more stories and more reviews that didn’t have to be written in 20 minutes?
Mothership will have podcasts, short-form videos, and even a newsletter, but it will still be a website first and foremost, one that readers come to daily to read smart things from smart people, and one that embraces identities and perspectives that are still radically underrepresented in the rest of the gaming media space. What the two men call the launch of the site will include the work of Mary Sue co-founder Suzanne Polo and other elders Polygon my colleagues like Nicole Clark And Nicole Charpentier. Subscriptions starting at $7 per month (there’s a lifetime discount for those who sign up before the Jan. 26 launch) will fund quality journalism and criticism that doesn’t have to feed a gauntlet of display ads with endless clicks.
“There will be no programmatic advertising on Mothershipwhich is a badge of honor,” Hannah said.
“People remember this THE Mary Sue It was like when there was a team of five people instead of a team of one, and they remember what Teen Vogue It was like that and they believe in this idea too, and especially when I talk to women that I know that play games, and people that I know that play games, I just see the light in their eyes when they hear that, and they’re like, ‘I want this so much, and I believe in this so much,’ and that happened a lot more often than I expected,” Myers said.
She continued: “I think when you have an idea like this, you’re like, ‘Well, I’m just going to write for me. I wrote for me in the past who wanted a website like this and it doesn’t matter if maybe six people read it,’ you know, that’s fine. But there have been so many people who have said, ‘no, I really want that,’ that it’s given me and Zoe so much more of confidence that this might be a real idea We should actually If we do this, we should stop interviewing for other jobs and put aside all of our other things that we were thinking about doing and take this seriously.
Mothership is the latest in a series of subscription-funded indie gaming media outlets that are blazing an alternative path to the current internet collapse thanks to social media monopolies, changing media consumption habits, and the proliferation of AI slop. These include new companies like Consequences And Second wind as well as historic brands that have recently become independent such as Giant bomb And Digital Foundry. It is also the fourth to come out of Polygon sales, with former employees also founding websites Thug, Design RoomAnd After the games.
The latter is a series of magazine podcasts written by former Polygon EIC Chris Plante, who interviewed Myers and Hannah about their new site and the history of women in gaming media for the last episode. Notably, among all these gaming sites, Mothership is one of the few that isn’t entirely or even mostly made up of straight guys. At a time when the national newspaper of reference pontificate openly on whether feminism has destroyed the modern workplace and angered online mobs embrace anti-woke conspiracies, Mothership does not shy away from viewing the game within an identity-driven framework.
“We know that gaming journalists and critics who have covered the intersection between gaming and gender, bodies, and identity have faced serious backlash in the past, and contributors here at Mothership “We are also facing this ourselves,” the site’s announcement says. “With your help, we will build a sustainable business that can afford rigorous editing processes, sensitive readers and legal counsel when needed for high-risk investigations into high-profile studios and gaming personalities.”
“I feel like feminism has become a dirty word in a lot of circles,” Myers told me. “It is [considered] cringes and I feel like we’re in a really, really weird place with this right now, and it’s weird to me as a writer who’s been doing this since the beginning and has seen all these different phases happen, progress, then flashbacks, then progress, then flashbacks. I feel like I’ve seen that throughout my career, and I definitely feel like we’re in a blowback phase right now, but that’s part of why I feel like we need to keep doing this. We must keep trying.