Griffin McElroy’s statement on the Awful Squad stream today
“Hey, before we get started, I wanted to talk about the elephant in the room real quick, if that’s okay with you all.
“So obviously, Nick is no longer employed here at Polygon. And I think there’s probably a lot of you who have been following this situation, and there’s probably also a lot of you who maybe haven’t, and this is the first that you are hearing about it. And I imagine both of those groups are going to be very frustrated about the fact that we just can’t comment on it right now. I know that sucks, and there are answers to questions you all probably want, and there are things that you want to hear us say, but we are just not permitted to comment on it right now.
“But before we get started, I wanted to say that—I don’t know, I’ve felt uncomfortable this whole past week or so with talking about it from our perspective, and how it affects us and our team, because obviously we were not the ones who were most directly affected by what happened. But I think it’s worth talking about because we did kind of go dark all last week. We were getting a lot of messages from folks who were like, “Hey… where’d you go?”
“So I think it’s worth talking about. We kinda took last week off. A lot of that was because everyone was traveling, we were all doing this all-hands get-together that was completely unrelated to what happened, that’s just how it timed out. But really, the biggest reason why we kinda went dark is we were working through this, and there is a lot of difficult stuff that we were going through, both professionally—a lot of this stuff that we have worked on, and all worked to make, just sort of disappeared overnight—and, I mean, the bigger thing was, personally, we had been working through this. I feel like we are all out of our depth a little bit. This is not something that I personally have ever had to deal with, in terms of, like, a breach of trust of this magnitude.
“And so we took some time off. And, um. I am nervous and excited to get started again. This is really the first thing that we have all done together since everything went down, and I want everybody to know that we are excited to get making stuff again. We’re going to be working on new stuff; we are going to be working to make the stuff that we make already even better; we are going to be working on becoming more thoughtful about the stuff that we make and how we make it. It’s probably going to be, you know, a tricky transition for a little while, but I am optimistic that we can do a good job by it.
“So again, I know it’s going to be kind of like a cloud hanging over things for a while, and I know that that is not going to be helped by the fact that we are not allowed to comment on it, but I just want everybody to know that we are gonna be working to make this thing, and this weird dumb stuff that we all make together, even better now, and we hope that you will bear with us as we get everything figured out.”