Gayming Magazine – a new outlet created to “look at the video games world with a queer twist” – launches tomorrow, June 1st, 2019. With aspirations to be “the go-to online resource for the LGBTQ+ video game community, providing news, reviews and stories”, the website is available to preview now at www.gaymingmag.com.
Promising a diverse roster of writers and contributors from across the LGBTQ+ spectrum, Gayming Magazine hopes to be “exciting companion website to the entertainment world” and bring people together, be that through local gaymer groups, or by bringing the industry closer to the community through interviews and features on LGBTQ+ companies and developers. It also hopes to work with the industry to challenge the “assumed straight” hetero-dominance of video game characters.
“For too long, the LGBTQ+ community has sat on the fringe of the video games community, carving out their own niche,” said founder Robin Gray. “We want to celebrate that niche while also working with the community and with the industry to bring the two halves closer together, ensuring LGBTQ+ people feel welcome, included and represented within the gaming world they adore so much.”
The new UK launch follows the closure of two of the UK’s longest running magazines at the end of last year. GamesMaster dated back to 1993, while games™ had been running since 2002, and closed a month short of its sixteenth birthday. Their closure leaves Future’s Edge magazine as the last, long-running proponent in the multi-format games space.
“Despite the company’s strong performance overall, unfortunately, games™ and GamesMaster are no longer profitable parts of the business,” said Tony Mott, brand director of games. “The decision was an extremely difficult one, but everyone here is enormously proud of what the magazines have achieved in their lifetimes – an incredible 25 years in GamesMaster’s case – and we are currently redeploying affected staff within the company.”
