Update: Remember Me Developer Dontnod 'Not Bankrupt'

[JediMB]

Not even 20% of Mass Effect players even played female Shepherd by the way and cutting that feature would have likely been largely inconsequential to the series sales numbers.

Well, not even 20% of the players who were logged onto their EA accounts in Mass Effect 2.

It's also worth noting that 50% of that same player pool never finished the game. Granted, that has no bearing on the sales of ME2, but players who actually finish a game are more likely to pick up the next one. Now this is speculation on my part, but I would wager that an overwhelming majority of these likely disloyal customers exclusively played as the male Shepard, and also didn't pick up the DLC or the sequel.

And, at the end of the day, 20% is still a pretty huge part of the player base. No player base is homogeneous, but rather made up of a multitude of minorities. Cut a feature set that appeals to one, and then another, and eventually you'll basically have no customers left.

 

[CloudAtlas]

Not even 20% of Mass Effect players even played female Shepherd by the way and cutting that feature would have likely been largely inconsequential to the series sales numbers.

(...)

Also, where did you pull that last statistic? [/quote]

That one actually could be about right, if I remember correctly. Or maybe it was the % of playthroughs with FemShep, or something like that.

However, that could have also been due to the fact that, FemShep rarely featured in commercials, marketing campaigns etc, especially for the first two games (maybe not at all here), and apparently many potential buyes, female buyers in particular, weren't even aware that you could play as female protagonist too for that reason. At least that's what I've read.

Every single AAA game with a "strong female protagonist" other than Tomb Raider or Metroid sold abysmal numbers and either drove the studios working on them bankrupt or left them reeling from the bad sales for years.

Publishers interested in commercial success of their games or interested in developing a franchise would have to be brain dead to try to build it on the basis of a "strong womyn character" and not try to rely on sex appeal.

We're talking about a very small sample here. It is always dangerous to draw conclusions from small samples.

Anyway, you seem oddly gleeful about the (perceived) failure of games with female protagonists. Are you happy about those games failing? Would you prefer it if there were no games with female protagonists? Don't you think it reflects rather poorly on gamers if they have so little empathy so that they can't identify enough with a female character in order to experience a story from her point of view? Is all of that a situation that deserves to be celebrated?

 

[Evonisia]

I'm so glad I read this post update. I loved Remember Me (still my 2013 Game of the Year, though Saints Row IV is really fun atm) and I'd hate to see Dontnod go out of business.

Edit: And it would be a damn shame to waste Nilin like that, I loved her as a character.

 

[CloudAtlas]

Man, don't you know about them billions of hardcore female gamers? Publishers like totally don't know what they do eith their oh-so-irrational "creepy cull of female protagonists".

There are probably more than you think. Read this, for example: http://howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/2013/12/marketers-fear-female-geek-2/

And I really wonder about their ultimately mediocte reviews, after all it's the same people who pushed the idea how the so-much shitter pseudo-game Gone Home with as little as 2 minutes of total gameplay is 10/10 GOTY, or even actually the best game ever. (Any true and honest review should be 2/10, possibly more if the price was lower.)

Please go on. Statements like these do wonders for your credibility.

 

[CloudAtlas]

Man, don't you know about them billions of hardcore female gamers? Publishers like totally don't know what they do eith their oh-so-irrational "creepy cull of female protagonists".

There are probably more than you think. Read this, for example: http://howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/2013/12/marketers-fear-female-geek-2/

Marketers know their job.

Sure. That's why companies like Apple are constantly failing, right? Because they didn't listen to all those folks who told them that there's just no market for about every iProduc, right? And that's why Minecraft was developed and published by EA, because their marketing experts recognized the immense demand for a game like this, right?

And you know what? Marketeers like to make predictions based on data. On past sales and so on. But if your data is poor, your predictions will be equally poor. And that's precisely the problem here: There simply haven't been that many games, let alone really excellent ones, let alone in mainstream genres, let alone with huge marketing budgets, that feature female protagonists. The only one I can come up with from the top of my head that qualifies is Tomb Raider, and that game too is making a profit now.

And I really wonder about their ultimately mediocte reviews, after all it's the same people who pushed the idea how the so-much shitter pseudo-game Gone Home with as little as 2 minutes of total gameplay is 10/10 GOTY, or even actually the best game ever. (Any true and honest review should be 2/10, possibly more if the price was lower.)

Please go on. Statements like these do wonders for your credibility.

You're right, it was under 1 minute, actually: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9qlm8olmn0

It seems the irony was lost on you.

 

[CloudAtlas]

Or, maybe, at least didn't blatantly alienate gamers with things like having show the player character kiss a man. Something the devs chose to proudly proclaim to the world in their interviews.

A woman kissing a man? How dare they to "blatantly alienate gamers" like that! Man, that's as bad as, say, having a gay character making a move on you (a la Dragon Age 2). Outrageous!

Anyway Nilin didn't actually kiss anyone in the game, not that I remember anyway.

 

[ShirowShirow]

Please don't bother registering the existence of a user named Sonichu. It can only end poorly.

Anyway, despite the fact that playing through remember me was a physically painful experience for me I'm still glad they aren't going the way of the dodo. There was enough interesting ideas there for me to get behind a second game from the studio.

 

[CloudAtlas]

Few examples of very successful (also commercialy) games with female protagonists and big budgets (absolutely from a top of my head):
Resident Evil 2
Tomb Raider 2
Diablo 2
Onimusha
Left 4 Dead
Soul Edge
Mass Effect 2
Fallout 3

Now analyse it yourself. Protip: there are two distinct recurring eements regarding their fem protags, and you need at least one of these things in your game to have it sell really well.

Alright, let's analyse:

Mass Effect 2 and Fallout 3 have flexible-gender protagonists, Diablo 2 has no individual protagonist at all. According to wikipedia, Onimusha's protagonist is always male, Soul Edge is really old and doesn't seem to be a plot-based game at all, and Resident Evil 2 has two main protaognists, only one of them being male. So only one (and a half) games on your list actually has a fixed-gender female protagonist at all.

The most distinct recurring element of the female protagonists on your list seems to be their nonexistence.

Edit: I'm not sure if you're doing yourself a favor by drawing mod attention. I mean, you have a really red health meter and you're deferring to women rather disrespectfully as "womyn" all the time...

 

[Salad Is Murder]

I actually quite enjoyed it, although I'm glad I didn't pay full retail price for it. The combat was pretty bland and formulaic, but it was an incredibly attractive game and the story had a strong cyberpunk feel. I'd have been interested in a sequel certainly.

This, right here.

They constructed a really interesting world with some cool concepts and then dropped it into a shamefully mediocre brawler. What the hell?

I would have played the crap out of a game that was nothing but you messing with peoples memories and working your mojo on them without ever having to punch a single face.

Also my biggest complaint with the Bioshock games. Great writing, interesting characters and setting, terrible first person shooter what the fuh....

 

[OtherSideofSky]

As one of the few people who genuinely enjoyed Remember Me, this causes a twinge of sadness to briefly animate my dead, blackened heart.

 

[CloudAtlas]

Wrong. You need to have either (or both):

1. Protagonists of both genders, or an ability to choose between the genders (using predefined characters or character creation).

Alright. So for a game with a female protagonis to be succesful, it has to have a male protagonist. That makes sense. Well, that or tits.

A game with a flexible-gender protagonist is not a game with a fixed female protagonist. The "fixed" part is not always explicit, but always implicit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womyn and welcome to feminism.

I'm sure I'll be able to learn much from you about feminism... and that doesn't mean that you're not using the term in a disrespectful way.