Why I’ll Launch a Feminist Video Game Website in 2026 | games

WWhether you’re reading about the impending bursting of the AI ​​bubble or about mass layoffs and canceled projects in the video game industry, 2026 doesn’t seem like a hopeful time for gaming. Furthermore, gaming journalists — as well as all kinds of other journalists — have been losing their jobs at alarming rates, making it difficult to adequately cover these crises. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s White House is using video game memes as recruiting tools for ICE, and game studios are pulling back on diversity and inclusion initiatives in response to the broader world’s slide to the right.

The atmosphere is back, and we’ve lost mainstream feminist sites like Teen Vogue; Fanatics everywhere celebrate what they see as the death of the “woke.” Put it all together, and we get a depressing amount of torment for someone like me, a gay woman and feminist who has been a gaming journalist and critic since 2007.

Everything I just mentioned in that paragraph speaks to a pressing need for something different. That’s why I’m launching a gender and identity-focused gaming publication called Mothership. It is independent and worker-owned. It will depend on the support of subscribers to exist. Mothership will focus on reporting on the pros and cons of the modern-day gaming industry – along with investigations, reviews, critiques and historical deep dives into the games and developers who paved the way to now. It will be a website for people who read news with dread, including gaming news, and worry that Gamergaters always get what they want. It will be a place for readers who want something like Teen Vogue, but for games (without a company owner interfering).

After all, the last two decades have seen a lot of real and valuable change, and modern games are proof of that. We now exist in a gaming world with more female characters, more non-binary characters, more queer characters, and more characters who don’t fall into rigidly defined gender stereotypes. GDC’s State of the Games Industry 2025 survey found that 66% of game developers surveyed were male, compared to 75% in 2020, and 94% in 2009.

More people can now see themselves reflected in game characters, and more diverse development teams are creating them. But change did not come easily – and we have seen a lot of backlash against this progress. The few websites still in existence are able to cover this backlash while also keeping their reporters safe and motivated to keep going.

I’ve dreamed of starting a site like this for a long time; It’s not as if readers haven’t wanted it before now. The problem I saw with the idea wasn’t that people didn’t want it, it’s that I didn’t see a good way to pay for it. Journalism has been facing a monetization crisis since the advent of the Internet. It’s hard to convince readers to pay for something they used to get for free.

But I know the readers are out there. In the mid-2000s, I worked at a small feminist “geek girl” site called The Mary Sue, and I had the unique pleasure of writing very specific articles for a very specific audience. The Mary Sue relied on advertising income, which meant we all had to write up to six articles every weekday; There was no time to spend on investigative reports, for example, or long critical articles. I am still proud of what we achieved, despite the harsh working conditions, not to mention the amount of harassment we faced simply for existing. But I always dreamed of working somewhere with the same editorial competence without the harsh working conditions and quotas.

Later, I left Mary Sue and went to work at Kotaku and then Polygon, both huge gaming sites where I was writing for broader audiences, rather than the very specific site we catered to at Mary Sue. When I watched so many small gaming sites collapse over the course of the 2010s, I thought this was the only type of gaming site that would survive. The idea of ​​working at a small feminist gaming site — my dream — increasingly seemed like an impossible speck of starlight in a galaxy far, far away.

But then, in the summer of 2025, Polygon, the company I was working at at the time, underwent mass layoffs and a mass acquisition. We went from a staff of 42 people to just eight. After a particularly frustrating video call with the new owners of our website, I realized I was going to have to quit. Every piece of the dream felt good and truly dead. I did not enter journalism to be exploited by people who saw me and my colleagues as easily replaceable and barely human.

One of my colleagues at Polygon — Zoe Hannah, the games editor — also resigned for similar reasons. She surprised me with an idea she had to create a feminist gaming site. “You should do it,” I told her. Then I sat there for a moment and thought about it. no, we You should do it! This was what I wanted to do, before the industry turned me into someone so angry and jaded that I no longer believed it was possible.

Six months later, and after many DMs with former colleagues from Polygon, Mary Sue, and Kotaku, as well as other prominent writers who cover gender and identity in gaming — Zoe and I launch Mothership together today. We’ve benefited from advice and inspiration from many other independent, worker-owned outlets that came before us, such as Defector, Flytrap, and Aftermath. We have already crossed 1200 paid subscribers. (I custom The readers were there.) We don’t need millions of them. Mothership is a publication aimed at a very specific audience: people who no She fits the mold of the hardcore masculine gamer image that marketing and popular culture have been peddling since the 1990s. We want to serve this audience well.

I believe our website is essential in our current political climate. It should have been around before, when I and millions of other girls who grew up playing games felt out of place with media and advertising that was too focused on teenage boys. But it’s not too late for me to make sure it’s there now.