WWhether you’re reading about the impending AI bubble burst or mass layoffs and project cancellations in the video game industry, 2026 doesn’t seem like a hopeful time for games. Additionally, gaming journalists, like all other types of journalists, are losing their jobs at an alarming rate, making it difficult to properly cover these crises. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s White House is using video game memes as an ICE recruiting tool, and game studios are backing away from diversity and inclusion efforts in response to the global shift to the right.
The manosphere is back, losing mainstream feminist websites like Teen Vogue. Bigots everywhere are celebrating what they see as the death of the “woke man.” Put all this together and you have a tragic stew of fate for someone like me, a queer woman and feminist who has been a games journalist and critic since 2007.
Everything I’ve listed in this paragraph speaks to the urgent need for something different. This is why I’m launching a gaming publication focused on gender and identity called Mothership. It is independent and worker-owned. We need subscriber support to survive. Mothership focuses on research, reviews, critiques, and reporting on the good and bad of modern game creation, alongside historical deep dives into the games and developers that paved the way for the present. This will be a website for people who read news, including gaming news, with horror and worry that Gamergaters got what they wanted all along. And it’s going to be a place for readers who wish there was something like Teen Vogue, but it’s going to be a place for games (and without the knee-jerk of business owners).
After all, the past 20 years have seen a lot of real and valuable changes, and modern games are proof of that. We now exist in a gaming world where there are more female characters, more nonbinary characters, more queer characters, and more characters who don’t fit strictly defined gender stereotypes. In GDC’s 2025 State of the Gaming Industry Study, 66% of game developers surveyed were male, compared to 75% in 2020 and 94% in 2009.
More people than ever before can see themselves reflected in game characters, and more diverse development teams are creating game characters. But change is not easy. And we’ve seen a lot of backlash against this progress. Few websites in existence can cover this backlash while keeping reporters safe and motivated to continue.
I have long dreamed of establishing a website like this. It’s not that readers haven’t wanted it before. The problem I had with this idea wasn’t that people didn’t want it, but rather that I couldn’t find a good way to pay for it. Since the advent of the Internet, journalism has faced a crisis of monetization. It’s hard to convince readers to pay for something they’re used to getting for free.
But we know our readers are out there. In the mid-2010s, I was working at a small “nerdy girl” feminist website called Mary Sue, and I had the particular pleasure of writing very specific articles for very specific audiences. Because The Mary Sue depended on advertising revenue, we all had to write up to six articles per weekday. For example, there was no time for investigative reporting or long critical essays. I am still proud of what we accomplished despite the harsh working conditions, not to mention the amount of harassment we received just for existing. But I always dreamed of working somewhere where I had the same editorial privileges, without the harsh working conditions and quotas.
After that, I left the Mary Sue and worked at Kotaku and then Polygon. They were both huge gaming websites, and they were writing for a much broader audience than the very specific website they served with Mary Sue. In the 2010s and ’20s, I saw a lot of smaller gaming websites fall apart and thought this was the only type of gaming website that would survive. The idea of working for a small feminist gaming website – a dream of mine – seemed more and more like an impossible starlight in a galaxy far, far away.
However, in the summer of 2025, my employer at the time, Polygon, underwent mass layoffs and a buyout. The staff of 42 has now reduced to just 8. After a particularly discouraging video call with the new owners of our website, I realized I had to quit. Every part of the dream felt so good that I felt truly dead. I didn’t go into journalism to be exploited by people who view me and my colleagues as less than human and easily replaceable.
Another colleague at Polygon, games editor Zoe Hanna, also left for similar reasons. She pitched me an idea for a feminist gaming website. “You should,” I told her. And I sat there for a while thinking. no, we You should do it! This is what I wanted to do before the industry turned me into a person so gnarled and disgusted that I no longer believed it was possible.
Today, six months and many DMs later with former colleagues at Polygon, the Mary Sue, Kotaku, and other notable writers who have covered gender and identity in games, Zoe and I are launching Mothership together. We’ve taken advice and inspiration from a number of traditional worker-owned and independent outlets, including Defector, Flytrap, and Aftermath. The number of paid members has already exceeded 1,200. (I knew The reader was there. ) and you don’t need millions of readers. Mothership is a publication aimed at a very specific audience: people who: please don’t He fits the mold of the masculine, hardcore gamer image that marketing and pop culture has propagated since the ’90s. We want to serve this audience well.
We believe our website is essential in the current political climate. It should have existed long before I, and the millions of other girls who grew up playing games, were made to feel out of place by media and advertising focused on teenage boys. But it’s not too late to find out if it exists.
