uanime5 said:
Pat Hulse said:
It is commonly-accepted "conventional wisdom" that games with female protagonists don't sell, or at least they don't sell as well as they would with male protagonists. It is also commonly-accepted "conventional wisdom" that action films with female protagonists don't sell. This was often justified by citing films such as "Elektra", "Catwoman", or "The Brave One", all ignoring the fact that these films were all terrible. Then "Hunger Games" came out, a genre action film starring a female protagonist that is not overtly sexualized, and it broke box office records.
What is your point? There's a lot of films with male protagonists that did badly and some that were very profitable. You haven't proven anything by selecting one successful film and claiming that the success was solely due to the female protagonist, rather than the story or the marketing. To figure out which gender is better in certain films you have to compare sales from a range of films of this genre, not just cherry pick the ones you like the best.
First of all, it's difficult to cherry pick when there are only about a dozen cherries, and second, my point wasn't to show that a female protagonist was the reason "Hunger Games" was a success (although that certainly could be argued) but rather that having a female protagonist was considered the reason these films failed even though the more logical and likely reason they failed was because they were bad and audiences could tell they were bad.
uanime5 said:
Similarly, I'm sure people arguing that female protagonists don't sell would bring up "Beyond Good and Evil", despite the fact that Ubisoft (who hadn't yet become particularly prominent) was focusing most of its marketing efforts on their "Prince of Persia" title, which had both name recognition and a unique and compelling gameplay mechanic.
They may also bring up "Remember Me", which got mixed-to-negative reviews, and "Mirror's Edge", which generally got negative reviews and was very experimental with the first-person platforming. Meanwhile, the new "Tomb Raider" had the best sales in the franchise since the 90's perhaps because, I dunno, it was a good game? It might not have gotten reviews as high as say "Uncharted", but for a series that had been critically panned for years to pull off a turnaround like it did is not particularly common.
What is your point? Yes there are good and bad games involving female characters, however what publishers are concerned about are how many sales will these make before people realise they're bad. If games with male protagonists get more pre-orders or day one sales then from a publishers perspective they're more profitable.
Also Laura Croft became popular because she had was one of the first female protagonists in a video game and had big breasts. Seriously a programmer accidentally increased her bust by 150% and his boss realised that if she had big breasts they wouldn't need as much marketing.
And you're fine with the fact that game developers are more interested in selling you shit and hoping you won't realize it before it's too late? Wow, what am I thinking complaining about that?
And if Lara Croft became popular purely because of her sex appeal, why did she wane in popularity until her most recent outing where the developers toned down her sexualization and focused on story and solid gameplay? That may have been her biggest selling point in the 90's but we are not the same industry as we were back then.
uanime5 said:
The fact of the matter is, because of this "conventional wisdom", there are very few recent cases that actually support it.
Evidence doesn't have to be recent to be valid. A long history of games with female protagonists being less profitable than their male counterparts indicates that this trend is likely to continue.
I would love to see this evidence. Get cracking.
uanime5 said:
No one makes female protagonists because female protagonists don't sell, and on the rare occasion that one surfaces and the game doesn't sell well, it is attributed to the fact that there is a female protagonist. It's confirmation bias, pure and simple. Plenty of games with male protagonists fail, but because there are also games with male protagonists that succeed, no one assumes that's the reason games with male protagonists fail. However, because there are so few games with female protagonists and so few of those games are any good, it is difficult to accurately gauge what kind of impact female characters have on video game sales.
Firstly you're assuming that all failures are equal. There's a big difference between failing to make enough money to recover your development costs and failing to make as much profit as you wanted.
And?
uanime5 said:
Secondly if some games with a male protagonists fail, while other succeed then there's no evidence that the male protagonists is the main cause of the failure. By contrast if all the games with female protagonists do badly then it's possible that the female protagonist is to blame because it's a common theme between all these games.
Very easy to make this generalization when I can count the number of modern AAA titles with female protagonists on my hands.
uanime5 said:
Thirdly it's possible to consult with players about that they want in a game. If they generally say they'd rather play as a man than a woman then this means that a female protagonist is less popular than a male one.
Publishers tend to seek out people they assume are gamers based on "conventional wisdom". The truth is that "gamers" have broadened a great deal and just because female gamers aren't being polled as much for market research doesn't mean they don't exist or buy games.
uanime5 said:
Fourthly as I already stated it's possible to compare things such as pre-orders and day one sales to see whether games with male or female protagonists are the most popular. This eliminates any bias caused by a game being bad because at this point no one will know it's bad.
Again, when there are very few quality titles with female protagonists, this is a difficult distinction to make.
uanime5 said:
Your statement that women are less inclined to be brave or heroic than men would make me laugh if I weren't afraid you were being serious. I'm just going to err on the side of "you were talking out of your ass" and not dignify it with a response.
In other words you're too much of a mangina to admit that women don't want what you want them to want. Care to explain why women don't write stories about heroic or brave women. Why is it that characters like Buffy or Laura Croft are only written by men?
Um, because you're wrong? A woman wrote "Hunger Games" and women popularized it. Some of the most prominent genre authors today are women and women overwhelmingly outnumber men in terms of readership. If you're looking for recommendations of popular action-adventure fiction written by women about brave women primarily read by women, I'd be happy to give you a long list if you'd like one. Also, "mangina"? Seriously? What, are you fourteen?
uanime5 said:
Trying to make an argument for something is not the same as forcing anybody to adopt a particular creative vision. More often than not, it's less a question of whether or not someone "wants" to make a character a man or if they are simply making them a man because that's considered the "default". By making the argument for more female characters, it helps creators ask the question of why they make a character male and whether or not they've even considered making the character female. I'd argue that a lot of them haven't, either because it just never occurred to them (people are inclined to make characters by drawing from characters they are already familiar with, which are predominantly male) or because they buy into the "conventional wisdom" that "male is default" and making a character a woman is tantamount to "taking a risk" or "making a statement".
Developers should be free to make the game they want and you have no right to tell them how to make their game. The developers aren't idiots who just randomly make characters but do put some a lot of thought into each of the main character and how they effect the story. They don't need someone constantly shouting at them "needs more females, needs more females".
If you want a game with more female characters then make it yourself.
You realize this argument can be applied to literally any criticism of anything, right?
uanime5 said:
More to the point, if a developer WANTS to have a female protagonist but executives are shooting them down due to the "conventional wisdom", being able to cite a large number of people demanding that kind of representation in games is probably a very helpful thing to have. If people who want better representation don't ask for it, people who want to include it in their games will never be able to convince the marketing department that there's an audience for it.
The "conventional wisdom" is supported by sales data and numerous examples from other mediums (TV, books, movies, etc). You do realise that publishers spend large amounts of money every year to determine what will sell and what won't.
You've also ignored that developers can by-pass publishers using kick-starter or Steam if they feel that their idea isn't getting enough support.
Kickstarter is great for small titles, but even the most successful Kickstarters have budgets that pale in comparison to your standard AAA budget. Also, if you're not an established name, you tend to have less success in Kickstarter than a Tim Schafer or a Keiji Inafune.
Also, if publishers are so good at knowing what will sell, why is something like Kickstarter even needed or for that matter successful? If a Kickstarted project is incredibly successful and went to Kickstarter specifically because publishers passed on the idea, wouldn't that indicate that traditional publishers are working from incorrect or incomplete data? Shouldn't every Kickstarter for a game that publishers passed on fail if publishers are so good at knowing what people will buy?
I'll also refer you to this other Jimquisition episode on the fallacy of market research in the modern gaming industry: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/7405-Damn-Fine-Coffee
I do love Wynne.
