Hello again. Community Manager Sean Labode here doing another blog entry to talk about some more awesome things at Fireshine. This will also be my last entry as I will be leaving to pursue new adventures within the video games industry. Today I wanted to highlight working with the fabulous Gayming Magazine who partnered with us during the summer of 2020 for DIGIPRIDE. Robin Gray and his fantastic team behind the website have been a great asset for gaymers everywhere and to us here. Their site is the home of LGBTQ+ interactive entertainment news on the internet which also features their own podcast and recently the Gayming Awards (more to come on that later). DIGIPRIDE is where we’ll begin and hopefully be an inspiration for you to get involved too.
Originally set to be a UK tour bringing our games to various cities during each of their Pride weeks, Robin adapted the idea to be in line with lockdown where we could still put our games in front of players from the safety of their own homes. From June through to the end of August we were set to begin our digital campaign with lots of excitement and the adaptation of our Fireshine logo which we commissioned to be more diverse, inclusive and ultimately a celebration (by tylerjacobs.com).
Fireshine became top sponsor for this campaign with Gayming Magazine which ultimately brought a lot more colour to our company’s brand. Alongside other gaming sponsors we had great support from their team who pushed out the boat for us. We had our games kept up to date in their news and articles which were supported by tweets and website coverage, a push for Wishlisting our Steam games especially during the Steam Summer Festival, teaming up with Rainbow Arcade who are a team of LGBT+ streamers that played live on their channels preview builds of Disjunction as well as doing launch streams for Radical Rabbit Stew and No Straight Roads. I even got to feature on the Gayming Magazine podcast to talk about a selection of our games which their team also played through and wrote about on their site.
Towards the end of DIGIPRIDE Gayming Magazine teamed up with LGBT17 (Team 17) and Lucid Games to put on a D&D one-shot named ‘A Night to Remember’. Raising money for in support for two amazing charities I joined 3 other industry guests as Gayming Magazine’s Amiee lead us through her narrative as the Dungeon Master. There were many highlights, some lite cosplay, some serious roleplaying with voices, but more importantly hardly any natural 1’s rolled.
As mentioned earlier, the inaugural Gayming Magazine Awards 2021 took place this week (24th February) and it was truly an honour to be part of this. This is a HUGE milestone too as this is the first LGBT+ gaming awards! Fireshine were official proud supporters of the show whilst I got to be part of the judging panel (a lot of firsts). The whole process including the show itself was astonishing and we applaud all the hard work that went into this across the board, and we hope to see many more of these every year. Big shout out to Hades for winning Game of the Year too!
We would like to thank Robin and his Gayming Magazine team for helping us extend our reach to wider audiences and handling this for us. Our presence grew and it helped us build a more inclusive community, something to be extremely proud of as a LGBT+ community manager. I personally urge you to consider working with their team for their professionalism and fun ways to boost what your marketing and PR might include. DIGIPRIDE was a big win for us at Fireshine and I couldn’t be any prouder to have been flying our Pride flag during this campaign.
Thank you for your support.
Sean
Published: 26th February 2021
