Why I’m launching a feminist video video games web site in 2026 | Games

Whether you’re studying concerning the impending AI bubble bursting or concerning the online game trade’s mass layoffs and cancelled initiatives, 2026 doesn’t really feel like a hopeful time for gaming. What’s extra, video games journalists – in addition to all other forms of journalists – have been dropping their jobs at alarming charges, making it troublesome to adequately cowl these crises. Donald Trump’s White House, in the meantime, is utilizing online game memes as ICE recruitment instruments, and recreation studios are backing away from variety and inclusion initiatives in response to the broader world’s slide to the suitable.

The manosphere is again, and we’ve misplaced mainstream feminist web sites akin to Teen Vogue; bigots in all places are celebrating what they see because the loss of life of “woke”. Put all of it collectively and we’ve got a dismal stew of doom for somebody like me, a queer girl and a feminist who’s been a video games journalist and critic since 2007.

Everything I simply listed off in that paragraph speaks to an pressing want for one thing totally different. This is why I’m launching a gender and identity-focused gaming publication known as Mothership. It’s unbiased and worker-owned; it’s going to depend on subscribers’ assist to exist. Mothership will deal with reporting on the great and dangerous of modern-day game-making – alongside investigations, opinions, criticism, and historic deep dives into video games and builders who paved the best way to now. It will likely be a web site for individuals who learn the information with dread, together with gaming information, and fear that Gamergaters bought what they at all times needed. And it is going to be a spot for readers who want there was one thing like a Teen Vogue, however for video games (and with no company proprietor to kneecap it).

After all, the final 20 years have seen quite a lot of precise, priceless change, and fashionable video games are proof of that. We exist, now, in a gaming world with extra feminine characters, extra non-binary characters, extra queer characters, and extra characters who don’t fall into rigidly outlined gender stereotypes. The GDC State of the Game Industry survey for 2025 discovered that 66% of surveyed recreation builders had been male, in contrast with 75% in 2020, and 94% in 2009.

More folks than ever can now see themselves mirrored in recreation characters, and extra numerous improvement groups are creating them. But change has not come simple – and we’ve seen quite a lot of backlash to this progress. Few web sites nonetheless in existence are in a position to cowl this backlash whereas additionally protecting their reporters protected and motivated to proceed.

I’ve dreamed of founding a web site like this for a very long time; it’s not as if readers haven’t needed it prior to now. The drawback I noticed with the thought was not that folks wouldn’t need it, however relatively that I didn’t see a great way to pay for it. Journalism has been dealing with a monetisation disaster for the reason that creation of the web. It’s arduous to persuade readers to pay for one thing they’re used to getting without cost.

But I do know the readers are there. In the mid-2010s, I labored for a small “geek girl” feminist web site known as the Mary Sue, and it was a novel pleasure to jot down very particular articles for a really particular viewers. The Mary Sue relied on promoting revenue, which meant that every one of us needed to write as much as six articles each weekday; there wasn’t time to spend on investigative reporting, for instance, or long-form important essays. I’m nonetheless happy with what we achieved, regardless of the depth of these working circumstances, to not point out the quantity of harassment we confronted only for present. But I at all times dreamed of working for a spot that had the identical editorial remit with out the cruel working circumstances and quotas.

Later, I left the Mary Sue and went on to work for Kotaku after which Polygon, each large video games web sites the place I used to be writing for broader audiences, relatively than the hyper-specific one we catered to on the Mary Sue. As I watched many smaller video games web sites crumble over the course of the 2010s and 20s, I figured this was the one kind of video games web site that was going to outlive. The thought of working for a small, feminist video games web site – my dream – more and more regarded like an inconceivable speck of starlight in a far-off galaxy.

But then, in the summertime of 2025, my then-employer Polygon underwent a mass layoff and acquisition. We went from a employees of 42 folks to simply eight. After a very disheartening video name with our web site’s new homeowners, I realised I used to be going to should stop. Every piece of the dream felt nicely and really lifeless. I had not bought into journalism to be taken benefit of by individuals who noticed me and my colleagues as so simply replaceable as to be barely human.

Another considered one of my colleagues at Polygon – Zoe Hannah, video games editor – stop as nicely, for related causes. She hit me up with an thought she had for a feminist video games web site. “You should do it,” I advised her. And then I sat there for a second and considered it. No, we ought to do it! This was what I had needed to do, earlier than the trade had reworked me into somebody so gnarled and jaded that I now not believed it was even doable.

Six months on, after many DMs with former colleagues from Polygon, the Mary Sue and Kotaku, plus different notable writers who’ve lined gender and identification in video games – Zoe and I are launching Mothership collectively, at this time. We have had the good thing about recommendation and inspiration from many different unbiased, worker-owned retailers which have come earlier than us, akin to Defector, the Flytrap, and Aftermath. Already, we’ve surpassed 1,200 paid subscribers. (I knew the readers had been there.) And we don’t want thousands and thousands of them. Mothership is a publication for a really particular viewers: the individuals who don’t match the mould of the masculine, hardcore gamer picture that advertising and popular culture have been dispensing for the reason that 90s. We wish to serve this viewers nicely.

I imagine our web site is a necessity in our present political local weather. It ought to have existed earlier than, once I and thousands and thousands of different ladies who grew up taking part in video games had been made to really feel misplaced by media and promoting that was laser-focused on teenage boys. But it’s not too late for me to verify it exists now.