A lot of Polygon’s staff was laid off following Vox Media’s sale of the publication to Valnet, but two of its former guides writers are launching their own guides-focused website: Big Friendly Guide, which you can find at bigfriendly.guide. Ryan Gilliam and Jeffrey Parkin founded and are co-owners of the site.
Guides make Gilliam “feel like I’m helping someone enjoy something that’s very important to me and I know is important to them,” he tells The Verge. “And so when I lost the opportunity to do that at my usual 9-to-5, I wanted to continue it.”
“I hate sounding immodest or bragging, but what Ryan and I got really good at was helping people play video games,” Parkin says. Their work on guides helps people have fun with games, he adds — and assists with things like getting a giant horse in Zelda.
Big Friendly Guide will make most of its content available for free, and the guides themselves won’t be paywalled. But Gilliam and Parkin will also be opening a Patreon for the site as a way for people to support the work, which will also give people access to a Discord. There will be a weekly podcast that’s free for everyone and a monthly subscriber-only podcast where Gilliam and Parkin will discuss their coverage plans.
There will be ads on the site to start. “For now, at least, we’ll run ads to keep the lights on,” according to the site’s About Us page.) But the focus is more on building a community that trusts Gilliam and Parkin’s work and pays to support it. In addition to working on guides for games that interest them, Gilliam and Parkin want the community to make suggestions for guides that they can consider and respond to.
The release of Big Friendly Guide is just the latest outlet from Polygon staffers: former editor-in-chief Chris Plante launched the Post Games podcast and former curation editor Pete Volk launched the PV Guide newsletter. The new outlets follow the rise of other indie gaming publications like Aftermath and Game File.
With Big Friendly Guide, Gilliam and Parkin have modest expectations. “We’re not looking to build a brand and sell it or anything,” Parkin says. “I don’t think either of us want to get particularly rich. We want to keep doing this. That’s really what it comes down to.”
