Arcane Azmadi said:
Lightknight said:
Arcane Azmadi said:
Aaron Sylvester said:
Eh I don't blame the publishers, their market analysts are probably telling them that male leads sell slightly more copies than female leads (which isn't too hard to believe). They're profit-driven more than anything else.
Many publishers believe that since they are helping with funding + advertising, they should have a say in what the game is about. Often we're talking countless millions of dollars and anxious stockholders, so that's not exactly unreasonable.
But I still personally believe developers should have full creative freedom.
I blame them, if they're going to listen to marketing analysts that retarded.
Oh? You know better than game publishers (who make their living off of selling games) about the demographics of the consumer market and have collected a ton of sales data to verify your claims?
No, I'm just not a
twat.
"Durr, gamers don't want games with silly gurls in them. Who Raider? Met-what? Never heard of them!"
Metroid being female didn't make one lick of a difference. That's like having a blob as a protagonist and slapping a bow on it at the end of the game like that makes the game different. The game itself was also ground breaking. Tomb Raider was eye candy and you know it. The gameplay was also rare at the time (puzzle platformer where you can do flips in the air while dual wielding pistols? Also novel for the time). But Lara was successfully marketed as a bosomed beauty and that's what boys wanted. Hell, I know that's what I wanted as a kid. But are people calling for more female eye candy or are they asking for plain but competent female characters? Seems like the latter. Otherwise there's a non-trivial number of games with playable females in them. In fact, here's a list of 962 games with a main female playable protagonist. [http://www.giantbomb.com/female-protagonists/3015-2287/games/] So there's the high horse and then there's the imaginary high horse.
It would be different if the games didn't exist and publishers claimed they weren't big money makers. Instead they do exist which begs the question of exactly what people are asking for that isn't presently getting catered to both in the AAA industry and the indie industry? Is the demand for more opportunities to play with women or is there also a demand that the only choice be female? That'd be kinda insane if so. Is there a particularly high need for more women in violent video games? Because, as I'll show below, women generally don't like violent themes in other forms of media either and that's just a fact of life thanks to higher empathy and lower levels of aggression caused by both social influence and biology (hormones like testosterone are a hell of a thing that have drastic impacts on the sexual dimorphism of our species).
If a publisher's only condition for a developer is that they compromise their entire creative vision because some statistic-gargling blockhead has told them that it will theoretically let them sell a few extra copies then they don't deserve to be in the publishing business.
Oh? Do you instead have millions of dollars to contribute to making games get made? Because that's the only requirement there is to be a publisher. Having enough money to get the job done. Who fucking cares what you or I want? Is it not their prerogative to make decisions they think is best to invest with their money on?
People with this mentality end up getting on soap boxes and try to bully or insult people who are actually making games happen (that wouldn't have otherwise happened) into making games the way YOU (royal) want them made. What if, and this is just a thought, but what if what you want isn't what the average gamer wants? Everyone is making the argument that women want to play as women and would play these games if the protagonists were women. But wouldn't it then naturally follow that men want to play as men?
If not, if people don't want to play as their own gender then why are we even having this discussion?
If so, then you've got a real problem on your hands where the vast majority of core and heavy core gamers are males while women are in the vast majority of casual games as the NDP article I mentioned earlier found. Females make up the majority of the "Free and Mobile Gamers" category (the largest category), overwhelmingly in the Social Gamers category, and close to 50/50 gender distribution in the Casual Gamer category. Those three categories make up 60% of gamers and are a big reason why studies like the ESA show the gaming demographics at being around 51%/49% male/female.
So what's the problem? The Avid Omni-Gamers and Core Console gamers are overwhelmingly male to offset the number of females in the other 60% of categories in order to make the ratio still favor males. These two categories and perhaps the "Family Gamers" (think Wii) are the AAA targets. The core console gamers also spent more than twice the amount of the other categories despite being 9% of the total US gaming population. They don't just purchase more physical games than the other groups, but they also purchase more micro-transactions and additional content than any other group. They are also the most likely to go to the internet for additional information (which makes them a more viable marketing opportunity).
So when AAA developers are looking to make a game, they aren't going to focus on the 60% of the market that is irrelevant to them. Unless they are making a family game they also aren't going to focus on the additional 9% that market makes up and it turns out that the family market isn't even buying new games, they're apparently playing games they already own. So they're going to focus on the remaining 31% of gamers that are spending the most money and mostly male. When Naughty dog cried foul about the market research that was aimed at only males they were actually showing ignorance of their target market that the marketing company was actually right about. That being said, would Ellie not being on the cover make the game less amazing? Not one bit. Would her not being in the story make the game less amazing? Yes, incredibly detrimental to why we loved the game. Would I have been less excited at playing the entire game a Ellie? Yep. Joel was the right choice for the lead and Ellie was an amazing choice for making the story matter. Perfect condition really.
Now, we can pout and stomp our feet a whole bunch about how we want them to cater to the demographics present in the other 69% of the market. But that's not their target market and that isn't where the money is. We cannot pout hard enough of stomp loud enough to convince AAA publishers to throw away AAA money on non-AAA consumers. That would be ridiculous.
That being said, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. See, as men get older their taste in media starts to align more with females. We trend closer towards drama as a genre and I can corroborate that in my own tastes. The average gaming age of the AAA market was 30 before we saw them start to throw iOS into the studies which is irrelevant to AAA developers. What this means is that guys like me don't particularly care who or what we play with as long as the story is worth the experience. I'd say the single biggest contribution to diversity in gaming has just been the aging of the current gaming population. Sex still sells, I'm sure. But 30-somethings are getting to a point where that's not enough to sell a game. We want stories with motivations and conflict that make sense with the occasional quirky adventures for comedy. Older males still generally enjoy action/adventure but just to a lesser degree than our younger counterparts. We enjoy it enough to keep games like COD and GTA at the top of the charts but we now enjoy dramatic titles enough to encourage their production and I'd say that's turned out to produce amazing games.
That is assuming that gender differences in genre preferences in movies and books apply to games. Which does appear to be the case when looking at the differences in genre purchases between genders.
http://www.flurry.com/sites/default/files/blog-images/GameType_byAge_andGender-resized-600_0.png
