Drag queen fighting game Drag Her! is being shut down

All work on Drag Her! has ceased due to a lack of secure funding.
drag her game

Highly-anticipated comedy fighter Drag Her!, which starred a cast of deadly drag queens, is being shut down after three years in development, due to a lack of secure funding. The team at Fighting Chance Games took to Twitter / X to confirm the news, and to thank fans for their enthusiasm over the last few years.

Drag Her! was a popular title in online social circles, for its novelty and fun, and its depiction of popular drag queens like Alaska 5000 and BenDeLaCreme. It achieved an early boost with a successful Kickstarter in 2022, but this small USD $75,000 injection seemingly wasn’t enough to sustain work on the game.

While the funding aided production of an ample demo – which was a major hit on the SXSW Sydney 2023 showfloor, and at other events – the team wasn’t able to secure publishing support, which would have helped the game to market.

“Over the life of this project, we have pitched to a long list of publishers, platforms, and more looking to get Drag Her! picked up,” Fighting Chance Games said. “Despite a groundswell of audience support, a fully funded Kickstarter, successful grant applications, and wonderful turnout at major game events – no amount of legitimacy we built has culminated in a deal.”

Read: The SXSW Sydney 2023 Games Showcase contained multitudes

Due to a lack of funding, all work on Drag Her! will now cease, and the team behind it will disband. Fighting Chance Games has expressed deep disappointment with this decision, but admitted that “creative risk” meant the odds were stacked against the game from the beginning. Despite knowing this, the team pursued their goal of creating a “fun f*cking game.”

“This is because for us, Drag Her! was a killer piece of gay media – a chance to showcase the sheer joy of queer culture – and an opportunity to move the community forward,” Fighting Chance said. “A game that could normalise, equalise, and validate, rather than force us to the margins.”

To celebrate what could have been, Fighting Chance Games will release Drag Her! Failure to Launch Edition for free on Steam, on 17 May. This version of the game is incomplete, but does feature three queens to fight with, local versus, and online multiplayer. It will serve as the “final” release of Drag Her! as a marker of the ambitions driving Fighting Chance Games.

Leah J. Williams is a gaming and entertainment journalist who's spent years writing about the games industry, her love for The Sims 2 on Nintendo DS and every piece of weird history she knows. You can find her tweeting @legenette most days.