Welcome to Polygon! It's a website (finally)

Welcome to Polygon! While we've spent much of this year at theverge.com/gaming, thanks to the gracious hospitality of our colleagues at The Verge, it's all been in preparation for the move to our own domain.

Since February, we've been training our news team to be thorough, exhaustive, quick, and accurate. We've challenged ourselves to make the most beautiful reviews on the web and to rethink the value of a static score. And we've been producing beautiful, long-form features covering the world of video games, from the people who make games to the people who play them.

And now we're finally ready to gather it all under the Polygon domain, the result of a massive amount of effort from a massive number of people. But this isn't the end state for us; instead, it's just the beginning.

Everything we've done so far has been to build a solid foundation: The hiring, the writing, the videos, the website itself. Now, with that foundation, we're ready to share it all with you and start building up. At Vox Media, we don't think of websites as static repositories but rather as evolving, iterative platforms. Polygon is software and it's built to be updated. We want your feedback on what's here today, and we want to know where you'd like to see us invest. Our devs are in the forums now, taking your questions on the site, if you have any.

Our forums are organized around key areas: games and platforms. If you want to discuss Mass Effect 3's ending, you can do that in the Mass Effect 3 forum. If you want to explain why you're excited about the Wii U, then head on over to the Wii U forum. We also have a Meta forum to discuss all things Polygon (like our product-hosted AMAA), an Off-Topic forum to talk about anything from old video game controllers to smoked meats, and a dedicated Polynauts forum for the community to organize its topics. We'll even be promoting your forum posts to the home page as close to daily as we can!

And speaking of forums, we're happy to welcome the support of GEICO, who will be sponsoring them. It was important to the team at GEICO to be involved with the site and not simply have its name atop the forums; to that end, you can expect to see a real-life human being from GEICO participating in the forums and in our community. His name is Andrew, he's an actual gamer, and was responsible for this bit of Ocean Marketing-related Reddit success late last year. It's thanks to the support of companies like GEICO that we're able to bring you Polygon, and we hope you'll join us in welcoming Andrew to the community.

I'd like to start by thanking the team at The Verge, for graciously letting us crash on their couch for the better part of a year when their own site was still in its infancy. I hope to be able to repay the favor some day, but I suspect that may be difficult. Though Polygon is up and running, that doesn't mean The Verge won't be covering gaming with its own stellar blend of insight and analysis, so don't drop that bookmark.

The site's database was a coordinated effort on the part of Database Manager William Savona and our enormously overqualified interns, Jon Santos, Kelly Anne Williams, Michael Moore and Yakubu Budu-Saaka. We're still working on expanding the list, and it will continue to grow with the site.

Our sales team has been instrumental in getting us to this point: Katherine Bowe, Joe Purzycki, Tyler Hults, James Gross, Jane Levin and others I'm undoubtedly forgetting to thank. They're working to make us a successful business while understanding and respecting the delicate relationship between sales and editorial, and it's a pleasure to work alongside them.

While the job of writing about video games has its ups and downs, the real heroes of Polygon are the tireless Vox Media product team. That includes our expert in-house designers Brent Laverty, Tate Tozer, Georgia Cowley, Warren Schultheis, and Ally Palanzi; our superhuman developers Pablo Mercado, Blake Thomson, David Zhou, Dan Chilton, and Jake Lear; and the QA mastery of Cory Williams and Luke Zimmermann. And lastly, Senior Product Manager (and my good friend!) Justin Glow, for shepherding this entire project to completion on time, without any major explosions.

I need to thank the inimitable Lauren Fisher, Vox Media's General Counsel, and her team for plowing through any administrative obstacles with speed and for pursuing our domain with a singular tenacity that really paid off.

Lastly, Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff and Polygon co-founder and Chief Content Officer Marty Moe. Jim is, quite simply, one of the smartest people in online media today and his vision for Vox Media is beyond ambitious. What's more impressive is his ability to galvanize others into sharing that vision and then actually getting us there.

Marty has been invaluable throughout this process, serving in roles from leader to organizer to negotiator to internuncio to cheerleader. His enthusiasm is evident in everything he does, and Polygon wouldn't exist without him.

And of course, I want to thank everyone reading this post. If you've been reading Polygon at The Verge until now, your support has been crucial in getting us here. If you're just joining us, we're so grateful to have you.

Let's play!