They kinda have identity crisis sometimes. Recently I read a long opinion piece about WWE's Royal Rumble on Polygon, no idea why that's in there.

Stuff like this is what happens when you let metrics drive your vision instead of the other way around.

Which is pretty disappointing since originally their mission statement seemed to be that they wanted to escape that mindset (most of the original team came from Engadget and such).

The goal is to get traffic from facebook/reddit/twitter/etc, not to report unique or relevant things. By blurring the boundaries they create opportunities to link to each other and re-monetize content because both sites have a shot at pulling traffic from social media.

With respect to the business side that makes perfect sense. But as to their original direction when they were creating the distinct Polygon property, it's gone pretty far off-course.

Polygon was interesting when it started, but then they stopped their deep journalism pieces, adulterated the site with non-game content, and hired Ben Kuchera :-(

I think they found out in-depth longread type articles don't guarantee a consistent readership. It's possible to pull off if it's a once a week or twice a week kind of thing, but they were trying to do it as their main content source.

I dunno what happened with Ben - he was pretty enjoyable to read back at Ars Technica, but in the meantime has become downright obnoxious.

Ars had good editors.