Devs Had to Demand Female Focus Testers for The Last of Us
- Thread starter MikeWehner
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Next thing Naughty Dog will be announcing through their PR department will be that a member of their development team successfully preformed the Heimlich Maneuver to save a female play-tester from choking. As the CEO of a major publisher stood back watched, while smoking a cigar made entirely out of rolled up hundred dollar bills and gold dust.
At this stage the bullshit is getting a little thick.
At this stage the bullshit is getting a little thick.
Agreed. At this point, I'd buy it just to support a progressive developer.Sicram said:
However, one has to wonder at all this publicized conflict. Are these guys truly a group of crusaders championing a worthy cause for the good of all? Or are they super-savvy business-people correctly reading the political climate and cashing in on this wave of gender equality? Does it matter?
I think there is a broader story here-just how much do Focus Groups drive the artistic vision? I don't mean to say that it doesn't happen in other media, or that every developer is beholden to the marketing department, but it does seem to be the norm. This would be like if some marketing suit had walked up to Orson Welles and told him he needed to have a Musical Number in Citizen Kane.
These suits, their focus groups, and other such business school crap are huge drivers of what does, and does not, get made all over the media world - including video games. That's why we get so much "follow the leader" - someone saw Call of Duty sold 300 zepbillion copies, and decided that that is how you make money on video games, so we get a bunch of crappy knock-offs. In the movie business, the same thing happened. In 2002, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man became the first movie to make $100M in a single weekend. Between box office and other revenues, it made about $1B. For a movie in 2002, that shook out to be an absurd amount of money. So for the past 11 years, we've been getting follow the leader works - like the abominations that were Green Lantern, X3: Last Stand, Transformers, Transformers 2, Transformers 3. Now fortunately this trend actually resulted in an abnormally high number of good movies, but the stinkers were still there, still made money, and will keep coming until they don't (good or not, DC will be making a Justice League movie because dammit Avengers made like 30 trillion dollars and we have what's basically the same thing help what is moviemaking). Video games do the same thing - Riot Games makes 30 trillion dollars per second from League of Legends, so I'll be damned if I'm going to sit around not getting a piece of a pie that my crude, scientifically unfounded models show is there and is also huge and also also easy to take.Mahoshonen said:
Basically I hate business people for not knowing how shit works (i.e. make something that doesn't suck).
This makes me glad I preordered it. I loved the Jak series and the Uncharted series and am glad to support such a positive dev group
This is the second time i've heard news of naughty dog having to fight for women, it's getting ridiculaous. I feel i'll have to buy the game multiple times so that naughty dog can make such a profit that people realise women exist. Shouldn't be this hard to get female leads, we live in the future damnit!
And the tears of third world children who made the box art covers with only a man in a sweat shop. Children tears hold the best cigars together.Paradoxrifts said:
2clueless said:
See I read both of these comments and thought..... Hmmmmm is it really this bad? Are the people of the various development teams really this oppressed? Or is there some HELLACIOUS hype going on? If it were really this bad would we even have female DEVELOPERS? These guys make it sound like the publishers all smack a woman on the ass as she walks by because it will "improve her mood and make her feel good about herself"
If it really is this bad then how the fuck are these publishers still in business? And why are we not hearing about some major lawsuits yet?
I'm in the same boat as you; I don't understand why including female testers in the focus group is that big of a deal or why the lack thereof would be such a problem (aside from maybe a research standpoint, to see if the game does have broader appeal).Helen Jones said:
The game isn't even about gender, it's about a fungal-zombie apocalypse, with a male protagonist to boot. If they really wanted fine-tune it to appeal to their target audience they'd only demand fans of the genre, not a forced ratio based on sex.
But at least they didn't give in like they did with Bioshock Infinite.nathan-dts said:
I find it rather appalling that this "no women in the focus testing or on the cover" thing isn't just an oversight, but an active and systematic endeavor by publishers. I suppose it makes sense that none of this is an accident, but still. It's rather disturbing. Or "creepy," as I believe Jim Sterling worded it.
I realize these actions stem from a desire to make money rather than actual misogyny, but I still can't help but feel this way when I hear of devs fighting tooth and nail for things that I never realized was even a problem. If I'd realized my gender was going to be such a problem for the games industry, I would have avoided the mistake of not being a white, heterosexual male between the ages of 18 and 30.
Naughty Dog is a pretty cool guy.
And I can't think of any way to frame the rest of that so they're just cool guys.
And I can't think of any way to frame the rest of that so they're just cool guys.
To be fair, they did include and advertise the fact that there's the reversible cover. That's better than a lot of companies, and even when not dealing with gender politics I'd like to see that kind of stuff more often, variety never hurts.Lilani said:
The idea of focus testing is to present your work to a group of people who accurately represent portions of your customer base, so that you can gain perceptive on how the public at large will react to it. When you're making something, you are too close to it in order to be able to determine what the audience is going to think of what is put in front of them, so focus groups give you an unbiased way to critique your work.UberPubert said:
In theory, one should poll at least a few different groups of people in order to get the broadest range of perspectives. Believe it or not, men and women do react to things differently at times, so if you're going to sell something that is for either gender getting both sides is important. However, the exclusion of women from this process means they aren't interested in that demographic. It basically is about forcing demographic ratios, because you want the broadest range of opinions so you aren't testing your game in a vacuum. When designing a game it is important to know what fans of that genre will think of it, but it's also equally useful to know what people who aren't familiar with the genre think of it. And men, and women, and everybody else who might play the game, even outside the demographic they are aiming for. Again, the game shouldn't be designed in a vacuum.
It's this blind following of very limited groups of focus testers that lead to Elizabeth not being on the cover of Bioshock Infinite. Apparently their panels of exclusively male focus testers didn't like Elizabeth being equally portrayed on the cover, so they booted her to the back, even though she is by all accounts the most prevalent protagonist in the game.
But it still wasn't their top priority. While I agree it is a good step that they took the initiative to do that, and we should tell them in big bold letters "THIS IS GOOD, KEEP DOING THIS," they've still made it clear they value the opinions of those focus groups more than anything else. So really, what I would like to tell them in big bold letters is "THIS IS GOOD, BUT WE BOTH KNOW YOU CAN BE GREAT."hazabaza1 said: