One would think that in a “profit driven industry” that Game Companies might actually … you know … look at some sales data.
Then I think of …
And I am having some trouble with the assumption.
Yeah, three characters. Add femShep in the mix and you have maybe several more female protagonist games. The point is that nobody wants to risk it.
Hmmm ... There needs to be more to it then that though. The numbers do not support the assumption.
Or ... are they unwilling to risk another break out success (like Tomb Raider) in what is a "male club"?
I don't know if three named female protagonists is proof of anything. :)
Honestly, I think it boils down to "good games sell", and I suspect the reason "female protagonists don't sell" is because the games featuring female protagonists have a higher than average chance that she's female for the "oy! bewbs!" thrill, and if that's the depth of your design acumen, odds are good that the game will also be terrible.
I mean, Tomb Raider is probably the chief representative of this, it just happened to also be a very good game.
I really doubt there's a universal rule that "people won't buy games with female protagonists", though I can see how it's an easy excuse to make. But then again, I have no statistical market data, so maybe it's true.
I just really doubt that a game like, say, Crysis would have been a massive flop if the lead character had happened to be female. Or that Borderlands 2 would have eclipsed the sun had Maya and Gaige been dudes.
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The interesting other side of this is that publishers refuse to spend as much on marketing of video games that have female protagonists:
So there's a suggestion based on this article and similar research that the video games don't sell as well... because they don't get marketed as well... but the publishers refuse to spend marketing money on them... because they don't think the game will sell.
Some people suggest the radical idea that if someone really makes an effort to market a game--a GOOD game--that happens to have a female hero--it will probably sell quite well.
Of course, that's probably silly.
This just adds to my own personal, deeply held belief that "video game publishers are stupid." Even with my kickstarter fatigue I can see myself in the future mostly buying games that are crowdsourced or otherwise funded without the "help" of a publishing company.
This just adds to my own personal, deeply held belief that "video game publishers are stupid." Even with my kickstarter fatigue I can see myself in the future mostly buying games that are crowdsourced or otherwise funded without the "help" of a publishing company.
Are "video game publishers stupid" or unwilling (as I said above) to "to risk another break out success (like Tomb Raider) in what is a 'male club'"?
Some people suggest the radical idea that if someone really makes an effort to market a game--a GOOD game--that happens to have a female hero--it will probably sell quite well.
Of course, that's probably silly.
Not silly, just, er, impractical. The real problem is the paucity of good games. which ranks with the paucity of good novels, good movies, good plays, good concept rock albums, you name it. And the fact that, quite frankly, even good games (novels, movies) don't sell themselves.
The recent J.K. Rowling flap illustrates that. Robert Galbraith got great reviews and sold 1500 copies. On Sunday morning, Galbraith was revealed to be Rowling and sales went up 500,000 percent -- that's five thousand times as many sales.
Behold the power of a ready-made market.
Games have an even shorter shelf-life than books; you've typically got a two month window to get all of your sales. You have to get people walking into Wal*Mart on day one and buying them off the shelf. This means, in turn, they need to know just by looking at the cover art what the game is going to be like, which means either another endless sequel (Final Fantasy MDCCLXIX) , a tie-in with an existing fan-base ("Iron Man on a S!") or an obvious clone of something successful ("Annoyed Penguins!"), none of which is likely to be a "good" game.
Or you can spend an unbelievable amount of money in preadvertising to try to create day one demand. But that's harder, less reliable, and generally less profitable. And still runs the risk that all you're doing is "polishing a turd" and the game isn't that good in the first place.
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Are "video game publishers stupid" or unwilling (as I said above) to "to risk another break out success (like Tomb Raider) in what is a 'male club'"?
I doubt they are neither (as a general demographic. I am sure there are individuals who are both :p). I think the main difference between male and female protagonists, is that you only write female protagonists when you have a specific reason to. Which means that games with female protagonists tends to have a particular female-specific approach (which the cynic in me suspect is something like 90% titillation, 3% RL women's issues and 7% "just to be different"), whereas the male hero is the default if you don't have any specific reason for making them female.
Which is a whole different issue than the "but people don't buy games with girls in them" excuse. Which I still don't buy.
Honestly, I think the healthiest thing the industry could do is to write their games and their stories, and then throw a die to decide the gender of the main character. Assuming, of course, that you can't just leave that choice up to the player.
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Metroid
Honestly, I think the healthiest thing the industry could do is to write their games and their stories, and then throw a die to decide the gender of the main character.
You wouldn't get the day-one sales without a lot of expensive marketing. The artwork about the protagonist is one of the key marketing decisions that sets the tone of the game. Which is one reason that the characters are even more clone-y than the games themselves. If you liked Too Human, you'll love <X>.... you even get to play the same character.
Interestingly, both the recent Tomb Raider and Resident Evil 6 were financial disappointments for Square Enix and Capcom, while Bayonetta sold so well that Sega pulled out of funding the development of the sequel.
Is the whole industry having problems?
MetroidThe recent one sold a whole half a million copies in NA, which was well below expectations.
I didn't even know there was a recent one, which only adds to the problem. I was referring to the original.
You wouldn't get the day-one sales without a lot of expensive marketing. The artwork about the protagonist is one of the key marketing decisions that sets the tone of the game.
I don't think that's true at all. Again, Crysis, are you really saying the game would have sold significantly less if the main character had been slightly more slender?
An unknown character is an unknown character. I don't see why a female character requires more expensive marketing than a male character. Or are you suggesting that I'd look at the cover of Crysis and go "hey, a guy. That's just like Commander Keen! Now I know everything I need to know about the game!"?
Who looks at the cover of games any more, anyway? :)
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Interestingly, both the recent Tomb Raider and Resident Evil 6 were financial disappointments for Square Enix and Capcom, while Bayonetta sold so well that Sega pulled out of funding the development of the sequel.Is the whole industry having problems?
Indeed it is! Expectations aren't meeting reality, and companies overspend on advertising and marketing to such an extent that the games need to sell huge numbers in order to break even. Tomb Raider sold 3.4 Million Copies and was still a financial failure for Square Enix. Didn't help that they shoved in an entirely needless multiplayer mode that no one wanted.
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You wouldn't get the day-one sales without a lot of expensive marketing. The artwork about the protagonist is one of the key marketing decisions that sets the tone of the game.I don't think that's true at all. Again, Crysis, are you really saying the game would have sold significantly less if the main character had been slightly more slender?
An unknown character is an unknown character. I don't see why a female character requires more expensive marketing than a male character. Or are you suggesting that I'd look at the cover of Crysis and go "hey, a guy. That's just like Commander Keen! Now I know everything I need to know about the game!"?
Who looks at the cover of games any more, anyway? :)
The mythical 'fratboy' market that exists and buys COD, Fifa and Madden. It's why Bioshock Infinite's cover looks the way it does, and why companies don't want female protagonists on the cover.
are they unwilling to risk another break out success (like Tomb Raider) in what is a "male club"?
I should point out that this is possibly the most unhelpful phrasing of the question I can imagine.
You don't risk success. Break out successes are by definition unexpected pleasant surprises. The games that turn into breakout successes are the ones that the company didn't expect to do especially well, but games that the company thought they could make on a low enough budget and market cheaply.
So what you're suggesting is "ignore the games that you think will make lots of money in favor of the ones you think won't." And you're directly contradicting DeathQuaker's idea of upping the marketing budget for games with female protagonists.
DQ is absolutely right. What are needed are better games. Unfortunately, those games don't hop out of the woodwork every day. Even a heavily marketed game like the most recent Metroid can come in well under expectations.
What game companies are really looking for are games that will sell above expectations, even when the marketing budget is controlled for. What are the factors beyond spending ad dollars that determine whether you get a ten thousand unit game or a million-unit game?
Or are you suggesting that I'd look at the cover of Crysis and go "hey, a guy. That's just like Commander Keen! Now I know everything I need to know about the game!"?
Yes, that's exactly what I'm suggesting. Not necessarily you specifically, but ten million people who aren't like you, who are wandering past the game in the aisle and willing to pick up "The Tales of Ripoff" on the basis of the cover art.
If you don't think anyone looks at cover art,.... why do they put it on the box?
Seems like a suspicious claim to me. There are a lot of good games with female protagonist, and a lot of females in games that arent there simply for the T&A factor. FF has a lot of both, they just dont place the female as the main in most of them.
X-2 i almost turned off before actual gameplay, but after suffering through the cheese, it turned out to have one of my favorite combat systems of the franchise.
Lightning was a solid protagonist, but most of the rest of the cast sucked, and the game itself wasn't that good.
The new tomb raider was very good. Bayonetta, great. Wet, a game based enirely on quick time was still good.
Most games that you create your own character tend to have a lot of females.
I seriously can not see a good game performing poorly just because the main is female. I can see designers making the main a female to try and compensate for a crap game though. See that in movies a lot.
In the modern gaming culture i think having a solid mmo component can add a lot of time people spend playing a particular game. That any CoD would be more profitable than the new Tomb Raider is just sad imho. Its even more sad to consider how well spoerts games do, and that execs might start letting more and more rpg/fantasy games die at conception in favor of sports games.
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MIRROR'S EDGE is another recent (ish) game with a female protagonist that apparently under-performed. It still sold something like 2 million copies in its first year on sale, which was actually okay because DICE made it as a relatively small, minor side-project to stop them going crazy making BATTLEFIELD games until the end of time. It didn't hit EA's sales projections, but it made a profit. Which is presumably why they announced MIRROR'S EDGE 2 at E3.
I don't think the problem is a female protagonist per se, but more that the mega-selling game franchises haven't taken a proper chance with a female protagonist. There was some disgruntlement that GRAND THEFT AUTO still hasn't had a female lead character, and with 3 in GTA5 it seems they could have introduced one. It's all the more odd as the GTA series has a fair number of female criminals, cops, agents, civilians etc as major supporting characters, just not one as a main. It seems way past time.
Limitations on the role of women soldiers in western militaries may explain a similar lack in CALL OF DUTY, but even there, there is some scope with the games set in the future and the games partially set in WW2: 75,000 female Russian soldiers served at Stalingrad alone, for example. That would be an interesting path for either Treyarch or Infinity Ward to take at some point.
Probably doesn't help that sports and cod games are all multiplatform while bayonetta 2, dragon crown etc are exclusive. People don't want to spend $1,200 bucks on a bunch of systems so they can then spent another $60 per game they want to own.
It probably only going to get worse. In a few years people may be trading consoles with games instead of just borrowing the game. One guys xbox and games for his friends PS and games.
This is one of those evolving debates.
I've a theory that current game designers have a hard time imagining a female character as being financially successful, and therefore it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy...not only because the unwillingness to invest in it from a marketing-development standpoint...
...but also a potential "where do we start, we aren't sure" from a development/research angle. That is, it is difficult to build up a story or the concept of an interesting female character if this has not been the norm for decades.
That is, if a person's expertise is in one area and focused in one area, it can be difficult to branch out into another one. That is, we do need more female game designers and marketers and fresh faces.
This is not to suggest incompetence--at all. Rather, it suggests the side effects of a long-term focus and the difficulties of learning to reach outside of that.
Seems like a suspicious claim to me. There are a lot of good games with female protagonist, and a lot of females in games that arent there simply for the T&A factor. FF has a lot of both, they just dont place the female as the main in most of them.
Hey. X) I just wanted to add a quick comment here, because I see this echo'd from time to time. See, I wouldn't say "a lot." I would say, "more than before." I think it's possible that if we looked at a neighborhood and there weren't any Hondas, and suddenly there were three Hondas, we might say, "Wow, there's a lot of Hondas."
That is, it isn't always that there's "a lot;" it's just that it can appear that way because it wasn't something we were used to seeing. Therefore, it stands out and it can easily appear that there are more than there are.
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Only talking from personal experience (and admittedly, that's not good to go on on any level, really), the gender of the protagonist really has nothing at all to do with my level of enjoyment of any game I play.
I mean, if anything, it'd be cooler to see more females as protagonists. Think of the TF2 characters as women, or a female Grand Theft Auto protagonist. That'd be awesome! Certainly not worse, even when I try and think about it in the mindset of not just if it were made that were now, after the fact, but with the mindset of what if the game came out with a female team/protaganist only.
Better gameplay decision aside (ie. the whole point of getting new parts of the suit works like this, and that makes sense from a story point of view through the series), she made a point at the very beginning of the game that she put herself in the hands of her commanding officer. Adam could have been female and she still would have done it, and nobody would have been laying blame on gender. That's ridiculous.
One would think that in a “profit driven industry” that Game Companies might actually … you know … look at some sales data.
Then I think of …
Laura Croft
Bayonetta
Jill Valentine
And I am having some trouble with the assumption.
Your first quote is cherry picking.
1) Of the covers with females, only one one actually has a women who is prominent and in the foreground.
2) He's comparing the best selling games with female characters with subpar games with male characters.
Don't cherry pick. Look at the whole picture.
He completely ignores that fact that:
1) Games with exclusively male playable characters do 25% more sales than games where you can play a male or female character
2) Games with exclusively male playable characters do 75% more sales than games where you can only play a female character
I'll help you out. The actual counter argument is that statistically the sample size of female character only games is too small to be statistically relevant. If you brought the numbers to a statistician, he'd tell you that the data looks compelling, but it's too small a sample to be sure what is actually going on.
Which that in itself is also interesting, IMO.
There's a lot of data about why game companies are putting solo dudes with a gun on the cover. They run focus groups with 12-20 y/o males and, surprise, surprise, they think dudes in commanding poses with guns are pretty cool. They have mountains of research data on what teenage boys like and think is cool. The machismo fantasy is appealing to boys who are trying to find their place in society, so all the advertising gets focused on selling that aspect of the game, even if the game isn't really focused on that (though quite a few are).
Also, it's interesting to note, Square Enix consideres the sales figures for Tomb Raider to be disappointing.
Really, part of the problem is just that the big publishing houses have unrealistic expectations of sales and are deathly afraid to deviate from the norm on the chance they might lose their "core demographic".
Partly, I agree with the folks at Bioware. I think if publishers and designers put in the effort to make good games with female characters and adequately market those games, the current audience will get used to it over time and we'll start adding other people to the market as well. A sort of "if you build it, they will come".
Here's the PA article with the data on current gen games.
669 games
300 with the option to play a male or female
24 where you can only play a female
345 where you can only play a male
Female character only games represent less than 3.4% of games.
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I can't think about Metroid: Other M without seeing red.
I'm hardpressed to imagine anyone reasonable preferring Two Worlds over Skyrim on the virtue of it having male-only single player.
Personally, if more female lead protagonists got the same AAA backing as their male Gears of Dutyfield coutnerparts and took more pages from FemShep than Zaftig McPolegrind and were actually taken seriously by their developers and marketers, I'd like to think that the numbers would even out.
Man, I'd sure as hell hope so.
edit-And stop doing stupid @#$% like Other M.
edit2-Developers, you want to know what's really sexy? Confidence.
I'm hardpressed to imagine anyone reasonable preferring Two Worlds over Skyrim on the virtue of it having male-only single player.
But just imagine how many copies of Skyrim they could have sold if it had forced you to play a male character. Not to mention Mass Effect. It would be staggering!
:)
Fun fact: With all else equal, I tend to favour female characters, but my choice generally comes down more to a combination of voice acting, animation and character design than gender.
I know both my wife and several friends play Female Shepard largely for her voice actress, preferring it over the male version's voice. They are also jealous of my relationship with Tali.
I know both my wife and several friends play Female Shepard largely for her voice actress, preferring it over the male version's voice. They are also jealous of my relationship with Tali.
I actually found that the dialogue flow more naturally with maleShep's voice actor. Which I realize is a hanging offence in some parts of the world. :)
Not silly, just, er, impractical. The real problem is the paucity of good games. which ranks with the paucity of good novels, good movies, good plays, good concept rock albums, you name it. And the fact that, quite frankly, even good games (novels, movies) don't sell themselves.Some people suggest the radical idea that if someone really makes an effort to market a game--a GOOD game--that happens to have a female hero--it will probably sell quite well.
Of course, that's probably silly.
I realize the desire is idealistic at best. The reason, however, to want a quality game is so that we can assume the game fails to sell well because of gameplay quality. My thinking was running along the lines of "Remember Me"... which got attention because publishers didn't want to publish it because it had a female heroine.
Turns out the game's actual problems are more along the lines of some mediocre and scattered gameplay (although it's still supposed to be pretty fun). But as it was poorly reviewed because of gameplay issues, it is entirely plausible publishers will point at it and go "SEE, games with female protags don't work," using the same logic Warner Brothers movie executives used when claiming "Catwoman" did poorly because it had a female lead.... and not perhaps because it appeared to have been written and directed by a developmentally disabled chimpanzee (with apologies to chimpanzees everywhere) (after all, we know that "Halle Berry in leather catsuit" must immediately lead to poor sales).
So that's why I want a "good" game, understanding that is hard to come by. But it then makes it easier to analyze the effect of the demographic of the protagonist on the success of the game.
The recent J.K. Rowling flap illustrates that. Robert Galbraith got great reviews and sold 1500 copies. On Sunday morning, Galbraith was revealed to be Rowling and sales went up 500,000 percent -- that's five thousand times as many sales.Behold the power of a ready-made market.
While Rowling's name may have helped The Cuckoo's Calling sell, you know what it didn't help sell? The first printing of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Yet that eventually became a massive hit.
While yes, ready made markets are valuable things in terms of earning an instant profit, there is still plenty of room to introduce new IP that actually does game fame and status because lots of people hear about it and like it. That includes in the video game world, as challenging as it is to guarantee first-quarter sales.
ARGH I'd forgotten about that >=(
While Rowling's name may have helped The Cuckoo's Calling sell, you know what it didn't help sell? The first printing of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Yet that eventually became a massive hit.
J. K. Rowling uses initials solely because her publisher told her male names sell better and they wanted her to use a gender neutral pen name.
While Rowling's name may have helped The Cuckoo's Calling sell, you know what it didn't help sell? The first printing of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Yet that eventually became a massive hit.J. K. Rowling uses initials solely because her publisher told her male names sell better and they wanted her to use a gender neutral pen name.
J. K. Rowling uses initials solely because her publisher (the publisher willing to buy her first book) told her male names sell better and they wanted her to use a gender neutral pen name.
The recent J.K. Rowling flap illustrates that.While Rowling's name may have helped The Cuckoo's Calling sell, you know what it didn't help sell? The first printing of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Yet that eventually became a massive hit.
True. But let's look at this situation a little more closely, because it illustrates some of the pitfalls from a (game) publisher's point of view.
First, as was pointed out, The Philosopher's Stone was rejected many times over before it was accepted, and when it was accepted, the advance (Rowling's "fee," as it were), was less than $3000. No one thought the book was actually worth very much, and in that sense it was a classic "breakout success."
Second, Rowling's experience (and Bloomsbury's) are hardly typical; not everyone can be the single top selling modern author (by definition, only one person can be).
So we can assume there was a reason that a dozen different publishers wouldn't touch it and that the one that did touch it bought it for pennies. And, as was pointed out, even the publisher that would touch it insisted on changing Rowling's name because, well, female. And we don't know whether they were right.
Third, the economics of book publishing and game publishing are substantially different, because publishers don't pay authors to write books. They pay authors that have written books, based largely on the amount the books sell. This effectively transfers the risk from the publisher to the prospective author. If I have a book in my mind, I can write it at my expense, sell it to Bloomsbury for $3000 (probably something like $3/hour if I'm a fast writer) and then hope like hell it sells a billion copies, making me $2 a copy.
With games, the developers are usually on salary and they expect to be paid whether the game sells or not. It's also a lot more labor-intensive to develop a game than a book. A typical book costs something like $20-50,000 to publish, which will pay for something like six months of a single programmer's time. So I can afford to take risks as a book publisher that I can't afford to take as a game publisher. If the book The Case of the Unripe Cucumber tanks, I'm out $25,000. If the game based on the book tanks, I'm out $25,000,000.
Now, of course, you're (you = DQ) right in that IF an absolutely brilliant game concept comes along, a can't-miss idea that's a sure-fire hit worth at least ten million units sold, a smart game publisher shouldn't reject this idea just because it's got a female lead. And a smart game publisher should be willing to put a substantial amount of budget into marketing this game. Given how rarely a sure-fire hit like this comes along, though, you'll be waiting a while to see this.
And even if this idea comes along, the obvious question arises -- if it were a male lead, could we turn it into a fifteen million unit blockbuster instead? The numbers suggest that a male-only lead nearly doubles sales; if you're asking me to leave fifty million dollars in additional sales "on the table" just because we need more games with female leads,.... well, that's not what most companies would consider a reasonable request. That's not what most stockholders would consider a reasonable request. That's, in fact, the sort of request that would get me fired and sued if I complied, even if the game itself made hundreds of millions of dollars.....
Hair could be part of the equation too. With few exceptions, female protagonists tend to have long hair, while most male protagonist are bald or have short hair. Making long natural looking hair that move and respond to the physical environment and the movement of the character without clipping issues requires much more work than making a character with short/no hair.
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Hair could be part of the equation too. With few exceptions, female protagonists tend to have long hair, while most male protagonist are bald or have short hair. Making long natural looking hair that move and respond to the physical environment and the movement of the character without clipping issues requires much more work than making a character with short/no hair.
Hadn't thought of that aspect, but of course you're right. And I should have thought of that aspect, as I actually saw a presentation by Pixar's hair guru about all the issues involved in making Merida's hair work well in Brave. They had I-don't-know-how-many Ph.D.s from top-notch schools working on it, and of course didn't have to deal with issues of animating the hair in real-time like you do in a video game. For that matter, they were capable of re-scripting and "re-shooting" scenes where the hair simply looked like hell, another luxury you don't have in a video game.
So you're right, that could very well be a reason that female leads don't sell. For all of you people who say "oh, I don't buy games for the lead character's gender, I buy them for the quality of the animation," this is something to consider.....
Now, of course, you're (you = DQ) right in that IF an absolutely brilliant game concept comes along, a can't-miss idea that's a sure-fire hit worth at least ten million units sold, a smart game publisher shouldn't reject this idea just because it's got a female lead. And a smart game publisher should be willing to put a substantial amount of budget into marketing this game. Given how rarely a sure-fire hit like this comes along, though, you'll be waiting a while to see this.
Sure, I understand that I am entirely in "it would be nice if" territory. But it would help to analyze the situation being discussed.
And even if this idea comes along, the obvious question arises -- if it were a male lead, could we turn it into a fifteen million unit blockbuster instead? The numbers suggest that a male-only lead nearly doubles sales; if you're asking me to leave fifty million dollars in additional sales "on the table" just because we need more games with female leads,.... well, that's not what most companies would consider a reasonable request. That's not what most stockholders would consider a reasonable request. That's, in fact, the sort of request that would get me fired and sued if I complied, even if the game itself made hundreds of millions of dollars.....
But what if you could show that, based on unbiased survey data, you could get more sales because of attracting a previously untapped market?
Part of the issue is that the marketing focus group and survey data looks at such narrow demographics that there is, to the best of my knowledge, NO solid data that a game sells poorly based on gender of protagonist alone. There is data that suggests that games with a female lead haven't sold as well, as linked prior, but there has not been in my opinion as to proper analysis of the data to show whether that was actually the reason they may have sold poorly (other reasons being, for examples, marketing issues, poor gameplay, poor reviews, poor graphics, unpopular genre, etc. etc.). It is loosely something like reading a medical study that says people who keep cats, ride bicycles, and drink coffee are healthier than those who don't, but there is no suggestion in the study what it is about the combination of these factors, or if it's truly one factor over the other, that makes people healthier; then someone reads the article and decides people who own cats are healthier than others without taking the other details into account (when it is, in fact, say, the bicycle riding that turns out to be the key factor that leads to these people's improved health).
And in fact, there is hard data (from the Electronic Software Association) that shows stuff like "45% of video gamers are women" and "more adult women are gamers (about 1/3) than are teen boys (about 1/5)". And while there may be different games attracting those demographics, more work could be done to find out what various gamers are looking for, adult women, teen boys, adult males, teen girl, etc. all around. Maybe we'd get that 45% more excited--as that is a fair chunk of potential sales--if there were more female leads in video games. Just as one hypothetical example. (As an aside, it also disturbs me that, on looking up that statistic, that means women gamer numbers have dropped, as that number used to be 48%--so there is in fact something going on in the video game market that is driving women away--and the software industry should be concerned, as that could suggest loss of sales overall.)
So you're right, that could very well be a reason that female leads don't sell. For all of you people who say "oh, I don't buy games for the lead character's gender, I buy them for the quality of the animation," this is something to consider.....
I don't know if there's been a whole lot of people saying that. In case 'you people' is only referring to my comment about picking character based on animation, it wasn't really intended as ammunition for the "women hair is dumb!" argument, and I certainly wasn't saying I buy games based on those criteria.
What I was saying, is that when I decide between a maleShep or femShep, I pick whichever doesn't have a running animation that looks stupid. I've already bought the game at this point.
Either way, I really doubt a statistically significant amount of gamers choose their game purchases based on the quality of hair animation.
And Cate Archer's hair was fab.
I'll help you out. The actual counter argument is that statistically the sample size of female character only games is too small to be statistically relevant. If you brought the numbers to a statistician, he'd tell you that the data looks compelling, but it's too small a sample to be sure what is actually going on.
Honestly, I'm not sure that that's the case. You'd have to run a t-test, and you'd probably want to include other generations' games in the sample to beef up your sample size as much as possible, but as long as your significance threshold isn't too high (p < 0.05 is sort of the norm, but you can feel moderately secure with your findings even at higher p values) your analysis will have at least some meaning.
In casual discussion, "There's a 10% chance the difference could have nothing to do with male vs. female!" tends not to be particularly compelling.
You wouldn't get the day-one sales without a lot of expensive marketing. The artwork about the protagonist is one of the key marketing decisions that sets the tone of the game.I don't think that's true at all. Again, Crysis, are you really saying the game would have sold significantly less if the main character had been slightly more slender?
An unknown character is an unknown character. I don't see why a female character requires more expensive marketing than a male character. Or are you suggesting that I'd look at the cover of Crysis and go "hey, a guy. That's just like Commander Keen! Now I know everything I need to know about the game!"?
Who looks at the cover of games any more, anyway? :)
Two things:
1) Looking at an individual game versus individual game is a little fruitless when trying to analyze only this one difference. It's like analyzing the 2008 presidential election and trying to make the argument that only black candidates will ever win the presidency from now on.
2) Games featuring women don't get a larger marketing budget, they get a smaller one. I think it's roughly 35% of the marketing budget featuring male characters. Marketing is a major impetus for sales. People don't buy your game if they don't know it exists, which makes this a chicken and egg problem. Are people not buying the games because they aren't aware of them (low marketing) or are they not being made aware of the games because they're unlikely to buy them?
Even if a company did take the risk and give a female driven game a 'full' marketing budget, what would that prove? Going back to point 1, it might not tell us anything, it could be an anomaly relying on factors not immediately apparent, or having nothing to do with the primary issue being discussed.
The interesting other side of this is that publishers refuse to spend as much on marketing of video games that have female protagonists:
So there's a suggestion based on this article and similar research that the video games don't sell as well... because they don't get marketed as well... but the publishers refuse to spend marketing money on them... because they don't think the game will sell.
Some people suggest the radical idea that if someone really makes an effort to market a game--a GOOD game--that happens to have a female hero--it will probably sell quite well.
Of course, that's probably silly.
This just adds to my own personal, deeply held belief that "video game publishers are stupid." Even with my kickstarter fatigue I can see myself in the future mostly buying games that are crowdsourced or otherwise funded without the "help" of a publishing company.
Bolded the part that sums it up for me.
I'll help you out. The actual counter argument is that statistically the sample size of female character only games is too small to be statistically relevant. If you brought the numbers to a statistician, he'd tell you that the data looks compelling, but it's too small a sample to be sure what is actually going on.Honestly, I'm not sure that that's the case. You'd have to run a t-test, and you'd probably want to include other generations' games in the sample to beef up your sample size as much as possible, but as long as your significance threshold isn't too high (p < 0.05 is sort of the norm, but you can feel moderately secure with your findings even at higher p values) your analysis will have at least some meaning.
In casual discussion, "There's a 10% chance the difference could have nothing to do with male vs. female!" tends not to be particularly compelling.
It was partially hyperbole.
Out of 669 games, only 24 have female only characters. Since games can vary on why they did or did not sell well for a lot of reasons, it's hard to point specifically at them as a group having female characters to be the lead cause for their lower sales. The sample size would become even smaller if you started to break it down by different genre.
For example, if you look at the FPS genre you have:
Perfect Dark Zero
Portal
Portal 2
Just looking at those 3 games, there's a wide variety of factors different to each one. PDZ was a sequel from another console. Portal was released bundled with other games at a highly unusual price point. Portal 2 was a highly anticipated sequel. Both Portals are highly divergent from the standard FPS style game. Etc, etc.
3 is not a good sample size to identify if female characters cause fewer copies of a game to be sold in the FPS genre.
Even if a company did take the risk and give a female driven game a 'full' marketing budget, what would that prove? Going back to point 1, it might not tell us anything, it could be an anomaly relying on factors not immediately apparent, or having nothing to do with the primary issue being discussed.
It would prove nothing. They would have to do it thousands of times in a row before we could compare it in any meaningful way to the rest of the market.
Look, I just don't buy the whole "oh it's everyone but us who are terrible and misogynistic" defense that the industry seemingly loves to throw out. I don't believe that games with female protagonists don't sell. I believe that games with female protagonists are not really being designed to any significant degree. And the reason for that, I think, is an entirely different issue than "nobody would buy it if we did."
Of course we would. When those games are of equivalent quality, marketing and hype, of course we buy them.
Tomb Raider ( which, ironically, I don't own) proves that a high quality game, with plenty of marketing, that just happens to have a female protagonist, can sell rather well. (And seriously, three million copies sold in the first month is only disappointing if you expected to be the WoW of platform torturepr0n).
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Tomb Raider ( which, ironically, I don't own) proves that a high quality game, with plenty of marketing, that just happens to have a female protagonist, can sell rather well. (And seriously, three million copies sold in the first month is only disappointing if you expected to be the WoW of platform torturepr0n).
Yes, it sold so well that Square Enix (the publisher) stated that it didn't meet expectations and cost the CEO of Square Enix his job. So it was disappointing to them!
(It's also everything I hate about modern gaming in a single game, so bleh)
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I like playing hot female characters for two reasons:
1. The same kind of idealistic fantasy that makes guys like beefy gun nuts.
2. Lesbian. :)
That said, I tend to get turned off by things that are ridiculous in that regard, like DoA Volleyball.