This goes hand in hand with releasing pink DS's or Playstations or whatever they want to pull out that they think will appeal to girls.

Sorry, I'll take my black playstation and a silver or blue gameboy over pink anyday, kthx.

And now a magazine devoted to casual girl gamers? Please. You don't need to seperate the markets for girls and guys overly much.

It's gonna turn into the videogame version of Cosmo. With headlines like "How To Get Your Man To Let You Play With His Wii." And the first piece of advice will be "Play With His Other Wii First."

I am still waiting for the Jet version of Game Informer.

'no need to separate gamers by sex'? lol
your choice of pic disproves your point. can you fathom a barbie secret agent game being reviewed by any typical gamer magazine? every gamer magazine I've ever thumbed through seems to obviously cater to men (or boys).

if there are enough women/girls to warrant a market for a gaming magazine catered to them, more power to them.

Its sad, but people need to segregate things in their mind to better understand them. That which we do not understand we fear.

I actually just had a conversation about this with some of my friends - someone noticed the latest issue of EGM lying around my apartment (hey, I got the subscription for free), and one of the headlines on the covers was something like "Gift Guide: What to Get Everyone from Your Best Bud to the Guy Who Slept With Your Girl".

Headlines like that make it clear that EGM assumes that gamers are male by default (unless they're going after that elusive lesbian gamer demographic). And that makes sense since EGM's readership probably *is* mostly guys, but it's hard for female gamers to relate to publications like this on an "I'm just a gamer like everyone else" level.

Now, I don't think that a female-only gaming magazine is the solution to this problem, but I do think it's worth pointing out that "mainstream" gaming publications are not gender-neutral.

I kind of like this idea, if it's done correctly. The gaming industry absolutely sucks towards women, it's stupid to act like something like this creates or even furthers the rift between gamer girls and gamer guys. If women get paid any attention, it ends up misguided at the best, and patronizing and misogynistic at the worst. It depends on how they do this, but it would be nice to have a gaming magazine that didn't constantly suggest that women only enjoy a certain kind of game, or that something being feminine is bad. Heck, it'd be nice if we had publications that didn't look down on gaming companies for honestly trying to reach out to the female audience.

Yes, it'd be nice if we could all ignore gender, but since just about every gaming institution out there refuses to, there's no reason to dock someone for wanting to give a proper female perspective.

I'm all for anything which will keep that shit out of the regular gaming mags. Segregate away!

I think it can be beneficial to acknowledge female gamers sepratly. Gaming is seen by most people as a guy thing, so by letting others know that, yes, in fact, girls do play games, it may help other girls realize that gaming is not just a guy thing, and be more into trying it. Anything that helps included more people is a good thing.

That said, if I ever caught my Fiancee reading a girl gamer magazine, I'd tell her to toughen up and get her ass over to Kotaku for some real news, none of that Barbie shit. (I kid, I kid)

This kinda.... umm bites...

Targeted demographics will always haul in the dollars faster than a generic group, especially for the tween set.

In some ways, I cringe when I hear news like this, (Why is the emphasis on the "girl" part of gamers?), but yet it shows that some marketing wanks are finally cluing into the fact that video games aren't "just for boys!"

I'm going to resist the urge to rant...cause the topic of "Girl Gamers" really urks me. Not that girls play games, but the ones that get all "girl power" over it.

PMS and FragDolls are incredibly lame.

Anyone who puts the word "girl" or "babe" in their name's are just looking for attention.

If a girl is a gamer, that's awesome. But if that same girl is an attention whore, then it's just as annoying in games as it is in real life.

But more on topic: a gaming magazine targeting a minority of the already limited gaming community is just setting itself to fail.

I'm willing, sort of, to put aside my doubts and think that maybe, just maybe, this could actually be a good magazine.

But the way in which I think it could turn out to be a good magazine is in a way that I don't understand why it would need to be a girl gamer magazine instead of just a gamer magazine. What is there to talk in an entire magazine that is only aimed at girl gamers?

As a female gamer, I do want it to be acknowledged that I exist and to have that factored into the current market. But I don't want a whole new bubbly pink candy coated barbie filled market created for me.

In general, I do prefer magazines aimed toward guys, even the non-gaming ones. There's something about marketing a magazine toward women that tends to make it rather inane and shallow.

Typical gaming publications do tend to have a more male-guided direction when it comes to gaming. I take no offense to these publications when they mention, for instance, 'locking oneself away in a room away from ones girlfriend...' where the intended audience in said statement is male. I suppose, however, that this sort of statement lets some females feel left out and it appears to me that a female gamer intended publication would play well towards those sorts. I have this feeling that this new magazine will not be as informative in gaming as most publications and will veer too much towards catering to gender differences. Haven't we already gone through gender separation in generations past in which women fought to be treated equally and won? Bringing out electronics in every shade of Pepto-Bismol is a perfect example of this back stepping that's occurring. It's almost as if we are reverting, where instead of having equal rights, we are going back to gender specific roles once again.

"Vanilla is also commonly used to mean "plain" or "conventional," derived from the use of vanilla extract as the most popular flavoring for ice cream." - Wikipedia.

Isn't it a little sad that a magazine aimed at female gamers gets a title roughly equivalent to "Play Boring"?

No matter how many gay men read Playgirl, it's still called PlayGIRL.

No matter how many women read EGM, they will still have cheese "gamers don't have girlfriends" jokes.

Why? Because magazines don't make money on subscription fees, they make them on ad sales, and the young, white, 18-45 male demographic spend a hell of a lot more money on products advertised in EGM than the 20 or so girls who can "play Counterstrike just as good as the guys! YAY!"

I honestly don't know how a female oriented game magazine will sell any ads.

Does Rolling Stone need a 'female' version? No - they manage, somehow, to present a human perspective that we can all relate to.

If I am reading a female writer and she refers to her boyfriend, I don't feel marginalized because I'm male - just because I cannot relate directly to her having a boyfriend does'nt detract from the quality of her work.

The whole reason for this is simple, and it has NOTHING to do with disenfranchisement or showing the female 'perspective'. It's marketing. Companies figure they sell games to boys with words and concepts like 'violence, Xtreme, MASSIVE DAMAGE!!!!11!!'. Female gamers get pigeonholed with Barbie games - as though all female gamers would like to play those pieces of shit. My ex would'nt touch that crap and she loves Zelda. Perhaps what we should be looking for is a neutralization of this simplistic and absurd marketing scheme - developers should be making good games that everyone likes, instead of these crap demographically targeted, no-production-values garbage that happens to be PINK.

The emo in these comments makes me want to raze settlements in Total War.

This reminds me, it's time to re-up my subscription to Ebony Gamer and check for updates on GayGamer.net.

I think that most of the talk here is bashing the symptom, and not the problem.

The magazine is a great idea. I work at a game store and you'd be surprised how many young girls come in looking for games. One trio walked right up to me and demanded that they be shown "games for girls". Neither I nor the little girls knew what they wanted to play, and I wasn't just going to throw a copy of Barbie Horse Adventures at them.

Similarly, I got the Wii on launch and my girlfriend loves it. She's better than me at most of the Sports games (I own at Baseball). Now she wants a video game system for Christmas. I helped her figure out what kinds of games she wants to play, but she has no clue what's out there aside from what I tell her.

So is it so wrong and sexist for there to be a magazine girls can go to to learn about games? If it's handled well, I think it'll do great!

I wonder how many other girls are actually responding to this. Everyone is saying they don't need to make magazines and other such things aimed at women gamers, but how do -you- know?

I'm a huge fan of gaming, RPGs, mostly, but I'm still a "girly girl" at heart. Yes, I have a pink DS Lite, and I'm looking for the pink PSP. I like pink, and I like the idea of this magazine, if it's done right.

A girl can be a hardcore gamer and still be into "feminine" things, too, guys. As long as this doesn't end up being like Gamestop's "Games for girls" fiasco a little while ago, I think this sounds promising. I just wish it'd come stateside.

Anyone who puts the word "girl" or "babe" in their name's are just looking for attention.

So HellKillaGuy is ok and 'just a guy', but HellKillaGirl is a chick starved for attention???

And people wonder why there's a need to segregate the market?

Sorry, with attitudes like this it's no wonder women don't play games.

Talking only about the picture that goes with the post, let me just say I'm just glad Vivendi doesn't do Barbie shit anymore *shudder*

I agree with some of the posters above that it would be nice to have a magazine that was completely non-gender focused, but unfortunately we aren't there yet. Almost all print gaming magazines have have zero or one female as a reviewer. And as I was told from an Editor at EGM last year, "Girls don't play games." So until the people who create the magazines change their attitude, there won't be a magazine that is truely gender-free.

Instead of a special gaming magazine, I would like to see more coverage about gaming in regular women magazines. If they review other forms of entertainment, it's time to review games also. That is something I would like to see.

The only reason to have a "female based community" is not to show other gamers that females game, everyone that isn't a jerk knows that. It's to show the marketing departments of the gaming industry that females game. They seem to be slow on the update.

Does Rolling Stone need a 'female' version? No - they manage, somehow, to present a human perspective that we can all relate to.

This analogy only works if music is an industry that is patronized primarily by males, something that is not true.

This analogy only works if music is an industry that is patronized primarily by males, something that is not true.

Well, while it is true that male players make up the majority of gamers, I'm looking at some stats right now that say about 40% of gamers are female, which is a pretty sizable portion. If you take a look at some of the figures organized by age group, you'll also notice that in certain age segments women actually play more games than men (this is particularly true for casual gamers 50+).

Besides that, though, I totally see why it's important to have a female gaming magazine. This type of coverage isn't something that's going to appear in Teen People or Cosmo Girl or anything like that. It just doesn't fit their target audience (Or, at least, they don't perceive it as fitting their target audience).

What I'd really like to see, though, is something like a casual gaming Reader's Digest for 50+ women. Heck, I'd sign my mom up for it.

This is ridiculous. I am a girl (a straight one at that), I play games, and I also play tournament paintball. If you've ever read a magazine aimed at tournament paintballers (Facefull, PB2Xtremes), you'd see ads featuring scantily clad women LEFT AND RIGHT. They even have a special section called "Pinup". Do I really care? Really? No, no I don't. If you are a girl and that type of thing SERIOUSLY offends you, you should get out of paintball. Or gaming.

I think its condescending to assume that a gamer girl would want to play a Barbie game as opposed to a quality game like The Legend of Zelda. Gamer girls are gamers and GAMERS like good games. However, that said, from a business standpoint, it could stand to make a fair chunk of money. Still kinda disgusted by it though.

Heres the thing, although marketing may cater to the boys for some games does that mean they're designed for guys? If a magazine is written with males in mind does that mean gaming is male? The answer is no. There are very few games that are made spefically with guys in mind. This magazine is just hoping to capitalize and try and create a difference between boys and girls gamers.

Ugh. I'm not sure about "specific requirements". Sure, there's a niche for female gamers, but I really just wanna play the same games as the guys. I'm quite happy with gaming magazines as I've seen them so far, and I've really never seen an article in such a magazine that I would have asked for a "woman's touch" on.

And this is coming from the gal with the pink home-made-fluffy DS case. >__>

Did any of you trashing Barbie games ever played one?