Ubisoft’s Frag Dolls disband

All-girl professional gaming group Frag Dolls have called it a day after 11 years on the scene.

The professional gaming team has throughout that time included 22 separate members as it strove to combat the idea that games are only for boys – an idea that has over the course of the last has been proven to be completely false.

When the team was created back in 2004, we weren’t really sure what the Frag Dolls should be, and certainly never imagined what it would become. But we knew that it hinged upon the common misconception that video games were boys’ toys,” the Ubisoft-backed group said in a statement.

The essential appeal of the Frag Dolls emerged from those delightful moments of surprise when people discovered that women like us not only loved video games, we were REALLY GOOD at them.

Now, more than a decade later, the sisterhood lives on, but the world of video games has evolved. We can count it as progress that ‘girls playing games’ is no longer the source of surprise that it once was. We’ve said many times over the years that we hoped to one day see true gender equity across gaming communities, rendering an all-girl gaming team unremarkable. I won’t claim that we’ve reached gender equity, by any means; we still have a long way to go. But there has been progress enough that we’ve reached the clear beginning of a new era.

We’ve always believed that the video game is a powerful medium that anyone from anywhere could learn to love, and it’s heartening to see that truth being recognized more broadly. We are proud to think that we might have played a small part in moving the needle on that dial.

Ubisoft deserves our deep gratitude for their 10+ years of support for the team. They could have shut us down after the first year or two as a fun marketing experiment. But instead, they continued to say ‘OK’ to our ideas and give us the resources we needed when we needed them most.”

The UK arm of Frag Dolls was disbanded in 2008.