Three staff cut as Polygon moves away from features and video

US games journalism powerhouse Polygon has dropped three staff members as part of a tweak to its editorial direction.

Features editor Russ Pitts, video director Tom Connors and video editor and motion graphics designer Adam Barenblat left the website this month in a move that editor-in-chief Chris Grant links to lower than hoped audience numbers for its feature and video pieces.

We never thought starting a video game outlet was going to be easy and we’ve learned a lot in the last two years,” he said. We learned that there’s an incredible opportunity to tell in-depth stories about the people — both fans and creators — that make video games what they are. But we’ve also learned exactly how hard it is to do that with consistency and how much appetite there is for that kind of coverage.

When you’re publishing two to three pieces like that a week, bringing in the audiences day in and day out is tougher than we’d imagined it would be way back in 2012. Lesson learned. Will Polygon still make incredible features? We absolutely will. What will change is the frequency.

We need to find the right balance of interest and resource expenditure, so we can continue to produce the kind of longform work that you’ve come to know us by, while making sure that, when we do, you never want to miss it.”

Grant added that the site, which launched in 2012, is still growing and beat its previous monthly traffic record in May, with June being on track to beat it again. He adds that Comscore data rates it as the fourth largest games site behind IGN, Gamespot and Kotaku.

The news comes following the loss of around two thirds of the full-time staff at Gametrailers last week – as reported by Polygon, incidentally – just days after its acquisition by Defy Media.