It’s kind of funny that you “only realized this now” and it tells a lot more about you that you looked at these things for so long and only get this “realization” now, and even more that you think this is somehow “a problem that you have to do something about” than about “the industry”.
The ESA numbers might be true in the most liberal sense of the word, but everyone has to remember that they are provided by a lobbying body of the industry (which also stood up for things like SOPA in the past in the name of said industry, even though separate publishers when pressed on it would either say a different thing or not answer at all) that is supposed to make the entire Gaming Industry look good and presented in a misleading way without providing any further details.
The same study for instance also says:
“89% of the time parents are present when games are purchased or rented”
“80% of the time children receive their parents’ permission before purchasing or renting a game”
“93% of parents pay attention to the content of the games their children play”
If you believe this, I have a bridge to sell you.
If you look through these you will suddenly notice that the split between games differs a lot, especially based on type of game and genre.
“Core” games like GTA, Call of Duty, Battlefield and similar that sell in the millions at retail and set up new records every year, even outdoing the movie industry are mostly male-led.
CoD is 92% male, League of Legends is 90% male, GTA IV is 85% male, EVE Online is even 96% male
These games largely cater to their market, which are males usually between 12-30 years old.
On the other hand games like Bejeweled, Treasure Isle, Country Story, Happy Pets or YoVille with ~80% or Farmville and Restaurant City with ~70% female players are female-led.
Most big publishers have female-led franchises that cater specifically to that demographic, EA for instance has The Sims, Harry Potter games, Bejeweled, The Sims Social, Pet Society and similar. http://gigaom.com/2010/02/17/average-social-gamer-is-a-43-year-old-woman/
Adventure games in general have a wider female audience, see for instance The Blackwell Series, The Longest Journey/Dreamfall, Emerald City Confidential, Secret Files Series, Haunted, Gray Matter, Syberia Series, Nancy Drew Series, Still Life Series, Broken Sword Series, Edna & Harvey Series, A Vamypre Story, Winter Voices, To The Moon etc.
Don't get caught in the trap of saying that game publishers "aren't trying" to make money or wouldn't go for a specific market if there was money in it, because they do regularly and a lot of these products prove that. They just find out that in financial terms gender specific games that "feminists" might not agree with sell well to girls/women, while games with a high amount of action and violence and "core" games generally don't.
This isn’t “sexism”. It is simple business and common fucking sense. The genders are generally speaking different enough and want different things. Catering to your main market instead of retooling your game to appeal to an entirely different demographic or turning the games into a homogenized mess that the main market would never buy is what more publishers and game developers should be doing, not less. (Notice how “big” games like GTA, Call of Duty, Hitman and similar usually get the brunt of the complaints of “having to change”.)
Other games that are generally overlooked in these “talking points” are lower profile Indie games, back in August I took a look at some of the new releases on Steam and found quite a few that offer female protagonists, in the second half of the month alone there were games like: Memoria, Game Dev Tycoon, Assault Android Cactus, SpeedRunners, Hate Plus, Gone Home etc. that never get brought up or praised in these discussions (well, aside from that last one).
Not to talk about games only showing up on even lesser known game distribution methods like Desura or on Casual game portals.
Yet a small bit of the “industry” that largely coincides with the console AAA market and makes up what is possibly 5-10% of the entire Steam games released nowadays at the most seem to always be the only thing that gets “looked at” in these cases.
It's not even that the "AAA" industry didn't try, there are also a lot of examples of AAA-ish games out there with female protagonists: Oni, Mirror's Edge, Beyond Good & Evil, WET, Velvet Assassin, Heavenly Sword, No One Lives Forever I+II, Remember Me, Zanzarah, Venetica, American McGee’s Alice, The Wheel of Time, Drakan, Bayonetta, Hydrophobia
Aside from Tomb Raider (which sold extremely well on the sex-appeal when it was a fresh franchise), Portal (silent protagonist) and Metroid (which is basically a robot game and at the end it is revealed that the pilot is actually female) none of these games sold "AAA" numbers and none of them could develop into a franchise.
Arguing that “core” games with a 90%+ male market buying them need to change because a large amount of women are playing what amounts to a majority of Casual, Facebook and Mobile games is stupid.
Arguing that Social/Casual games need to change and offer more Space Marine and Modern Warfare variety because a large amount of men are playing "core" games would be equally stupid.
i love adventure games and the old point and clicks get alot of love on my pc. the ScummVM emulator gets used alot as i go back and play 'beneath a steel sky' and 'flight of the amazon queen' amongst my forever growing game library. some of them can be finished in under a few hours, but there are times when playing a quickie game is good (like while waiting for tea to cook or while waiting for a mate to show up as a movie) as opposed to sinking hours upon hours into one ( yes i'm looking at you monster hunter tri)
on a side note:
i can't remember who said it about girls not playing the games he does... but to be honest with you, there are alot of female gamers who do play violent videogames as much as the boys. i have a girlfriend who loves devil may cry, skyrim and monster hunter and just because she hasn't got the internet and plays them offline people still think she doesn't play those games. she does... and my gawd does she ever swear at them when stuff goes awy. also there are lots of us who play things like counterstrike and TF2 but you don't often find us on the mic chat unless it's a server we created ourselves.... as let's face it, who wants to listen to idiot boys who think they're all that over the mic and argue with them when we could just blow them up instead? and sims isn't aimed at just ladies... i know alot of male players and one of the most well known custom mod creators for sims 3 happens to be male.
yeah i'm a female player who games because they are fun, not because they are aimed at my gender or have female characters in them. when people realize that maybe we can move on and play games together without the moaning and carry on.... that a some people are in need of being kicked high in the behind online as dickheads no matter what gender can ruin any game for alot of people (cause yes, girls can be gits too... if you find an all female server by chance on tf2- which has occurred a few times-, chances are you'll get a shit storm of crud all the same). nuff said.
No...no...no, please don't scrape the bottom of the casual gaming barrel James. Please don't encourage the low cost/easy profit throwaway hidden object casual game sub-genre by either acknowledging it or worse by wasting your valuable time making a game in this sub-genre. I have taken this tsunami of casual games in stride so far but can we please draw the line here? Can you guys stop looking at everything as a shiny positive wonderful trend in gaming? Can you guys cover the good and the bad in a video for once? I have watched all of your shows up to this point and I just cannot stay silent anymore in the face of your blind optimism.
I am very sorry but no. NO. I made a PA account JUST to say this.
Whatever way you look at it, that attitude is poison.
If you are a gamer, that level of blind elitism completely cuts you off from that ENTIRE genre, as well as all people who enjoy them. Not to mention that while you are free to enjoy them, slandering a whole genre like this makes gamers look like the WORST kind of petulant children, a stereotype we struggle to get rid of as is, as well as making yourself look like the kind of moron who objectifies his own opinions, because that is EXACTLY what you have just done.
If you are a developer, all you are doing by closing off a market is losing a wealth of potential experiences to draw from, and are making your games poorer as a result. Like they have said before, whether you like a game or not, whether a game is good or not, it is still likely a good pool of experience to draw from.
PLEASE keep your venom away from games and gaming.
Posts
The ESA numbers might be true in the most liberal sense of the word, but everyone has to remember that they are provided by a lobbying body of the industry (which also stood up for things like SOPA in the past in the name of said industry, even though separate publishers when pressed on it would either say a different thing or not answer at all) that is supposed to make the entire Gaming Industry look good and presented in a misleading way without providing any further details.
The same study for instance also says:
“89% of the time parents are present when games are purchased or rented”
“80% of the time children receive their parents’ permission before purchasing or renting a game”
“93% of parents pay attention to the content of the games their children play”
If you believe this, I have a bridge to sell you.
Here are some more exact numbers:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/WandaMeloni/20100330/87019/The_Next_Frontier__Female_Gaming_Demographics.php
http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/december12010/index.html
http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/141/videogames.asp
http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/06/03/96-percent-of-eve-online-players-are-male/
http://www.casualnews.com/the-demographics-of-social-games-surprise-or-not/
http://readwrite.com/2013/04/11/why-mobile-game-developers-are-on-the-cusp-of-a-golden-age
If you look through these you will suddenly notice that the split between games differs a lot, especially based on type of game and genre.
“Core” games like GTA, Call of Duty, Battlefield and similar that sell in the millions at retail and set up new records every year, even outdoing the movie industry are mostly male-led.
CoD is 92% male, League of Legends is 90% male, GTA IV is 85% male, EVE Online is even 96% male
These games largely cater to their market, which are males usually between 12-30 years old.
On the other hand games like Bejeweled, Treasure Isle, Country Story, Happy Pets or YoVille with ~80% or Farmville and Restaurant City with ~70% female players are female-led.
Most big publishers have female-led franchises that cater specifically to that demographic, EA for instance has The Sims, Harry Potter games, Bejeweled, The Sims Social, Pet Society and similar.
http://gigaom.com/2010/02/17/average-social-gamer-is-a-43-year-old-woman/
The Sims and The Sims 2 are both in the Top 3 of the best-selling PC games of all times with The Sims 3 not far behind and rather far up on the list best-selling video games of all times. They cater largely to women.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_video_games
http://www.gamespot.com/news/ea-women-too-big-an-audience-to-ignore-6169357
Contrary to popular belief games like Dragon Age or Mass Effect aren’t played by that many women though, no matter how hard they might try to appeal to said market and they have over 80% male demographics: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-07-20-bioware-18-percent-play-mass-effect-as-femshep
http://cdn2.gamefront.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/mass-effect-3-infographic.jpg
UbiSoft has games like Just Dance, Your Shape, Petz, their “Imagine” and “My Coach” series (those are rather large, further games that get utterly ignored): http://www.commonsensemedia.org/game-lists/imagine-games-girls
As well as some neutral games like Raving Rabbids. Exploratory Adventure games like Myst/Uru have also been rather successful with that demographic in the past and there are still a healthy dose of those around (dozens of Myst clones for instance): http://www.minotdailynews.com/page/blogs.detail/display/1000/Women-play-as-many-video-games-as-men.html
http://www.sophiageorge.com/uploads/7/4/7/6/7476345/engaging_women_in_games_using_emotional_stimuli.pdf
Adventure games in general have a wider female audience, see for instance The Blackwell Series, The Longest Journey/Dreamfall, Emerald City Confidential, Secret Files Series, Haunted, Gray Matter, Syberia Series, Nancy Drew Series, Still Life Series, Broken Sword Series, Edna & Harvey Series, A Vamypre Story, Winter Voices, To The Moon etc.
Don't get caught in the trap of saying that game publishers "aren't trying" to make money or wouldn't go for a specific market if there was money in it, because they do regularly and a lot of these products prove that. They just find out that in financial terms gender specific games that "feminists" might not agree with sell well to girls/women, while games with a high amount of action and violence and "core" games generally don't.
This isn’t “sexism”. It is simple business and common fucking sense. The genders are generally speaking different enough and want different things. Catering to your main market instead of retooling your game to appeal to an entirely different demographic or turning the games into a homogenized mess that the main market would never buy is what more publishers and game developers should be doing, not less. (Notice how “big” games like GTA, Call of Duty, Hitman and similar usually get the brunt of the complaints of “having to change”.)
Other games that are generally overlooked in these “talking points” are lower profile Indie games, back in August I took a look at some of the new releases on Steam and found quite a few that offer female protagonists, in the second half of the month alone there were games like: Memoria, Game Dev Tycoon, Assault Android Cactus, SpeedRunners, Hate Plus, Gone Home etc. that never get brought up or praised in these discussions (well, aside from that last one).
Not to talk about games only showing up on even lesser known game distribution methods like Desura or on Casual game portals.
There even exists a subset of Japanese games that basically boil down to being romance games for a young female audience:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otome_game
http://www.englishotomegames.net/list
None of these seem to ever show up on thorough lists regarding female protagonists in games like the one on Mobygames since they are utterly ignored: http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/protagonist-female
Yet a small bit of the “industry” that largely coincides with the console AAA market and makes up what is possibly 5-10% of the entire Steam games released nowadays at the most seem to always be the only thing that gets “looked at” in these cases.
It's not even that the "AAA" industry didn't try, there are also a lot of examples of AAA-ish games out there with female protagonists: Oni, Mirror's Edge, Beyond Good & Evil, WET, Velvet Assassin, Heavenly Sword, No One Lives Forever I+II, Remember Me, Zanzarah, Venetica, American McGee’s Alice, The Wheel of Time, Drakan, Bayonetta, Hydrophobia
Aside from Tomb Raider (which sold extremely well on the sex-appeal when it was a fresh franchise), Portal (silent protagonist) and Metroid (which is basically a robot game and at the end it is revealed that the pilot is actually female) none of these games sold "AAA" numbers and none of them could develop into a franchise.
Arguing that “core” games with a 90%+ male market buying them need to change because a large amount of women are playing what amounts to a majority of Casual, Facebook and Mobile games is stupid.
Arguing that Social/Casual games need to change and offer more Space Marine and Modern Warfare variety because a large amount of men are playing "core" games would be equally stupid.
on a side note:
i can't remember who said it about girls not playing the games he does... but to be honest with you, there are alot of female gamers who do play violent videogames as much as the boys. i have a girlfriend who loves devil may cry, skyrim and monster hunter and just because she hasn't got the internet and plays them offline people still think she doesn't play those games. she does... and my gawd does she ever swear at them when stuff goes awy. also there are lots of us who play things like counterstrike and TF2 but you don't often find us on the mic chat unless it's a server we created ourselves.... as let's face it, who wants to listen to idiot boys who think they're all that over the mic and argue with them when we could just blow them up instead? and sims isn't aimed at just ladies... i know alot of male players and one of the most well known custom mod creators for sims 3 happens to be male.
yeah i'm a female player who games because they are fun, not because they are aimed at my gender or have female characters in them. when people realize that maybe we can move on and play games together without the moaning and carry on.... that a some people are in need of being kicked high in the behind online as dickheads no matter what gender can ruin any game for alot of people (cause yes, girls can be gits too... if you find an all female server by chance on tf2- which has occurred a few times-, chances are you'll get a shit storm of crud all the same). nuff said.
I am very sorry but no. NO. I made a PA account JUST to say this.
Whatever way you look at it, that attitude is poison.
If you are a gamer, that level of blind elitism completely cuts you off from that ENTIRE genre, as well as all people who enjoy them. Not to mention that while you are free to enjoy them, slandering a whole genre like this makes gamers look like the WORST kind of petulant children, a stereotype we struggle to get rid of as is, as well as making yourself look like the kind of moron who objectifies his own opinions, because that is EXACTLY what you have just done.
If you are a developer, all you are doing by closing off a market is losing a wealth of potential experiences to draw from, and are making your games poorer as a result. Like they have said before, whether you like a game or not, whether a game is good or not, it is still likely a good pool of experience to draw from.
PLEASE keep your venom away from games and gaming.