Drag Her! fighting game releases for free after development stops

What do you do when you have to stop development on your video game? You release it anyway.

Fighting Chance Games, the indie studio behind Drag Her! —  a drag-themed fighting game — announced Wednesday that it couldn’t secure enough funding to continue development and had to shut down and disband. However, it also said that it would be releasing the version that they had for free on Steam and itch.io as the aptly named Drag Her! Failure to Launch Edition.

“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,” a post on X (formerly Twitter) read.

An unfortunate update from us about Drag Her! – delivered on a gay variant of the dreaded white text-dark background combo.

tl;dr They got us gal. pic.twitter.com/Ytnp3MlcmA

— Drag Her! Team (@dragherthegame) May 15, 2024

The game, which had been in development for about three years, featured a number of famous drag performers — including RuPaul’s Drag Race mainstays Alaska, Manila Luzon, and Kim Chi, along with The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula royalty Landon Cider — going head-to-head in 2D fighting arenas. It also was set to feature drag queens Jiggly Caliente and Tammy Brown as assist characters and Los Angeles’ own Meatball as an MC.

According to an interview in The Verge, Drag Her! would’ve incorporated a much simpler control scheme compared to other 2D fighters, with just two buttons and an assist attack. It also wouldn’t feature the violence seen in other games like Mortal Kombat. You can see a ton of personality in the trailers, with a lot of inside jokes (the Kickstarter campaign set a funding goal of $69,000, as one example) and drag lingo. Fans will also notice that the developers included a lot of the real-life performers’ quirks and physical moves.

Drag Her! had also been featured at Day of the Devs, the 2023 Game Awards, and at the SXSW Sydney Game Festival.

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