Quote:
Originally Posted by SilverSyko
Developing a game that's only going to appeal to a female audience isn't particularly a good move. The majority of the gaming market is still presently comprised of men so if you completely remove that audience from the potential consumers of your title, income is going to drop dramatically.
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There's an
interesting article on wikipedia on the subject.
And the
link that provides statistical data on the demographic, show that the gap between female and male players nowadays is a lot smaller than people think.
47% female VS 53% male
At this point the idea that "female oriented" games wouldn't work is more of a preconception due to a long history of male oriented games than anything else. Raw data prove that best selling games are often the kind that significantly appeal the female population. "The sims" and particularly "The sims 2" and "The sims 3" are very good examples of this.
And let's not forget that the game that previously had the crown for best selling game of all time was Myst, which was an adventure game, in other words the genre that mostly attracted females to the gaming industry when "female gamers" weren't even considered.
There was a time when people thought shoujo manga would never work in the west, because "comics are for boys", and let's face it, the west comic production particularly in America has always been dominated by comics meant for a male only population. Why is that DC or Marvel never realized how much they could sell if they started making comics for girls as well? Because they never thought it would work, and we know that's absolutely wrong now.
Video Games are no different.
But to be honest things are already changing and I can't really agree that there are absolutely no games especially made for women. There are a lot of them... it's just that most of them suck... and nonetheless some of them sell fairly good.
I guess that what Joyce-steele is really complaining about is the fact that games that are traditionally male oriented, such as action games, RPG and so on, are still predominantly male oriented despite the change in demographic.
One of the main problems is the fact that women are already used to play male-oriented games, while men are not. For a company it's safer to continue as they always did. It is difficult to predict how the male population, which is still consistent, would react.
Moreover a franchise with a long history cannot suddenly make a turn on its gender orientation. Asking Tomb Raider to suddenly stop pandering the male audience isn't very sensible, since it's always been like that. It should be rather asked a new kind of game entirely.
BTW I'm not really into Tomb Raider and its sequels, so I don't know how the latest installment is, but I'd be very surprised if it was strongly male-oriented considering that the story was written by a woman.
PS: Can you honestly say that lately the Final Fantasy franchise isn't blatantly pandering female gamers?