This whole thing honestly leaves me pretty disappointed with games media in general and I'm probably going to ramble for a bit. I'm sure most of that is because of my limited understanding of the events, or people not being able to reveal more due to legal implications (Waypoint basically saying legal told them to not comment directly on it due to conflicts of interest and having to wait for the investigation to complete), but it still feels really scummy.
You hear a lot about how close the games media are to each other, but apparently Polygon's EIC's reputation is so bad nobody trusted him to take these allegations seriously as there were plenty of comments about how it was good that they were investigating and not closing ranks. Or maybe people were to worried about the victims to tell him that one of his employees, for years, has been doing some seriously bad shit? But isn't part of the job protecting sources? They can protect their source for the big video games scoops but can't protect their source when reporting a serial sexual harasser to another media outlet and prevent them from harming more women? Especially when none of this needs to be public at all? Would Polygon have to name victims in order to fire Nick? It doesn't look like it but I'm not sure what exactly has been revealed.
Maybe handling it all privately is bad and its better that it all blew up publicly rather than Polygon simply firing Nick one day without comment, but it seems like something could have been done sooner. Perhaps people did more than they are admitting in public due to legal issues and people did try and do something about it, but maybe Polygon couldn't do anything until now. The whole situation is messy, but it seems like people talk about sexual harassment seriously, but don't take action like it is serious.
I'm sure this is quite unfair to the games media, and a lot of them do seem like good people, and maybe they will be able to talk about the process in more detail later and I'll be able to understand their perspective better, but right now to me it seems like they failed pretty badly at stopping sexual harassment.