Prospective Publishers Wanted a Male-Centric Remember Me

[The Unworthy Gentleman]

Star Craft II: Heart Of The Swarm

The player character is a woman out for vengeance after her lover gets killed. Star Craft II is about as popular as PC gaming gets. If HOTS sells well, then surely that shows that any game series can have a woman lead and still sell well.

Here's what annoys me about your argument: you claim that any example of a game with a female lead selling well is an exception. And yet what you ignore is that female lead characters make up such a paltry amount of games released that any such game is going to appear like an exception by default. If Metroid, Tomb Raider, and Star Craft II: HOTS can all achieve strong sales, then I'm sorry, we're no longer in exception territory here. This is a trend which shows good games with well written women can and do sell.

Again, Starcraft and Metroid are successful games from generations ago being brought over into this gen. I've never played Metroid's earlier games but wasn't Samus revealed to be a woman at the end of the first game, rather than making it an obvious part of the game. And Starcraft HotS is an expansion to an already widely purchased game with great gameplay, it's success would never be gauged on the gender of the protagonist.

See, if you mentioned an original IP like Mirror's Edge then you'd have made a good point. But even then the selling point of that games was this brand new style of play where you sprint around and jump on high buildings, the gender of the lead doesn't really matter when the entire marketing point of the game is "check out our fucking sweet gameplay, also you're a chick, but fucking look at this jump!"

I don't claim every game with a female protagonist is an exception to the rule but since the majority of games seem to be targetted towards guys, which is likely for good reason, a lot of those guys are just going to be your average CoD player who will be put off by playing as a girl. That's my argument, those are the guys you sell games to, Not you or me. The guys who care and the girls who don't are going to be your main focus simply because they're the largest group. Yeah, it's a massive generalisation but if you want to market something successfully then you need to be as general as possible.