Jen Glennon

Jen Glennon is a senior editor on the games desk at Polygon, focused on player-first coverage of video games, gaming hardware, and the culture around them. She brings more than a decade of experience in gaming and entertainment journalism, including work at outlets such as Kotaku, Inverse, and Newsweek, and joined Polygon in 2025. Her work at Polygon centers on clear, experience-driven writing that explains how games and devices feel in practice, not just how they look on paper.

Hands-on impressions of new games

Glennon’s game writing leans heavily on firsthand play, using her own time with new releases to anchor the coverage. In her piece on the Pokémon team’s new Soulslike, she frames the game through the experience of being repeatedly defeated and still eager to return, signaling an interest in how challenge and reward land for committed players rather than in surface-level feature lists. The emphasis is on the feel of the combat, the pull to keep experimenting after failure, and the way a familiar franchise can support a more demanding style of play.

Across her coverage, she favors tight, descriptive headlines that foreground the player experience and make clear what kind of audience each title will appeal to.

Hardware for handheld and everyday players

Glennon also reviews gaming hardware, with a particular eye for how devices serve specific kinds of players and play styles. In her review of the Xreal 1S glasses, she assesses them explicitly as “a worthy splurge for handheld gamers,” framing the piece around value, comfort, and practicality for people who spend significant time on portable systems.

That focus on use-case - who this product is really for and how it fits into daily play - distinguishes her hardware coverage from more generic spec-driven reviews. Rather than cataloguing technical capabilities in isolation, she ties those details back to concrete scenarios, such as playing on a handheld for long sessions or trying to make a premium peripheral justify its cost.

The result is hardware criticism that is useful to players making real purchasing decisions, especially those who rely on handheld platforms.

Coverage of platform shifts and console futures

Glennon contributes to Polygon’s ongoing coverage of Nintendo Switch 2, tracking developments around the upcoming hardware and its place in the broader console ecosystem. Her bylines on this topic situate the next Switch alongside current devices and expectations, reflecting an interest in how platform transitions affect everyday play rather than only industry narratives. She writes about new hardware in the same grounded way she approaches peripherals and games: by asking what changes will matter to players, how they will actually use new features, and where the friction points are likely to be.

This perspective helps distinguish her platform coverage from beat reporting that might focus solely on specifications or corporate strategy.

Long-running games and entertainment beat

Before joining Polygon, Glennon spent more than a decade covering games and entertainment across multiple major outlets, including Kotaku, Inverse, and Newsweek. That long tenure on the beat informs her current work, giving her a broad view of how series, genres, and platforms evolve over time. She draws on that background to place new releases and devices in context, connecting them to earlier trends in action games, role-playing series, and console cycles without losing sight of what matters to players now.

At Polygon she operates as a senior figure on the gaming team, helping shape coverage that balances big franchise releases, emerging niches like Soulslike spin-offs, and practical hardware advice for dedicated and casual players alike.