jaibryan said:
Gizen said:
uanime5 said:
The corporate/marketing line likes to say it was the former, but actual logic would lean heavily towards the latter. But admitting it was the latter would require the people in charge to also admit they weren't doing their jobs properly, and what what what? Corporate suits admit fault? Oh heeeeeeeell no, far easier to just blame the consumers and absolve themselves of guilt so they can go back to the status quo.
No idea what this is meant to mean. Care to explain why logic leans towards the latter or why it would be the fault of Corporate suits if the latter was true.
It's more likely that female lead games sell badly because people don't want them. It's not the fault of publishers that the market doesn't want a particular product.
This statement. This statement indicates you are either actively trolling or not actually reading what I'm saying. Either way it makes meaningless to respond to the rest of your points in long-form.
When a female-lead game comes out and is drastically outperformed by a male-lead game while simultaneously being drastically out-marketed and/or suffers from being on a console with a lower install base than the male-lead game, then logic dictates that it will underperform in comparison. To then believe that the female-lead game sold poorly specifically because of the fact that it was lead by a female protagonist in light of other, more rational explanations is simply foolish.
However, if you come out and admit 'our game failed terribly because we didn't market it properly and/or didn't put our full effort into making a quality game' you will lose your job. Or at least you damned well should. Saying it didn't sell because the lead was female shifts blame off of yourself and onto the consumer. It's a convenient scapegoat.
Which is what I already said, but you didn't read it the first time so I don't know why I'm repeating myself now.
but who gets to say why the game failed? everything you said was true but i know plenty of guys who don't like playing as girls, so saying the female protagonist is the reason a game failed is a valid excuse in this day and age.
And I don't know a single guy who doesn't like playing as a girl. In fact, I don't know a single guy who wouldn't rather play as a girl over a male character.
And that's the thing about anecdotal evidence, it doesn't prove much of anything. Evidence requires hard data, but there is next to no hard data to find because not only are female-lead games incredibly rare, but on the rare occasion one is made, it almost never gets the same kind of big push that a male-driven game gets. So to then turn around and say that the reason why it sold poorly was simply a female protagonist, well there's nothing to back that up except for anecdotal evidence. To know for certain, female-lead games would need to receive the same big push as male-lead games, and you need to make a lot of them to get a big enough sample size to come to a verifiable conclusion.
But, on those rare occasions a game with a female protagonist does recieve the big marketing push that all the other games get? Well, it generally still does quite well for itself. One need only look at the most recent Tomb Raider game. Yes, it 'failed to meet Square's expectations', but so did a lot of male-lead games released around that time, and that stems more from a bloated, overblown budget than it does the game failing to sell, because there is no metric by which that game did not do good sales.
But, again, one game does not make a large enough sample size to determine whether a female-protagonist actively hinders, helps, or has a neutral effect on a game's sales, so you need more. In this day and age though, where so many game companies actively refuse to invest in new IPs, creating a new female-lead franchise from scratch is hard enough, let alone then in-turn expecting it to be able to compete with the rest of the pack on a level playing field you would need to come up with real hard evidence.
As a result, taking a big name-brand, previously male-lead title and shifting it to suddenly have a female lead suddenly becomes the easiest and altogether best way to give female protagonists a shot. A great deal of the risk is diminished simply by being part of a large franchise. Being part of a brand-name franchise would essentially give it a much needed head start while also providing an easy reference point to compare to other titles, even if only in the same franchise, to see how it performs... That is, assuming it's also given the same marketing push and not released on a system with a tiny install base.