@harrysound said:
I hear these stats ALL the time and it's utter tosh.
I'm 35 so tick that box. I don't and haven't ever known a single female remotely interested in games.I know they're out there, somewhere. They're just absolutely nowhere near the number quoted.
The closest I get to seeing it is the cleavage on display on twitch. That shit just angers me.
I don't count anything to do with mobile platforms. The difference between the games industry and mobile industry is huge. You all know this of course. Don't kid yourself for arguments sake. 99.9% of the mobile games industry would not fly on a home console and core fans.
They're definitely out there. My friend's fiancee has been a life-long gamer, and so are some of her female friends. My old boss was also a female gamer, as have been several of my co-workers. The thing is, while I wish we could get some reliable numbers for the ratio of female to male console gamers, in the end it doesn't really matter. Even if women only made up 5% of the console market--and I believe the number to be way higher than that--men like playing as female characters, too.
That's reason enough to put cool female characters in your games, which thankfully has been happening for years. It's especially true for games with multiple playable characters, or character creators, such as Super Mario Bros 2, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, Diablo, Saints Row, Mass Effect, Street Fighter, Borderlands, and even the latest Call of Duty.
And while I can see how various suits at various publishers are probably too afraid to go with more central female characters in their games, and their marketing research is the reason developers have to fight to even put female characters on a box, I think they over estimate the effect that will have on their sales. Judging from the Black Ops 3 beta, guys really don't have much of an issue playing as a female characters, especially one who can see her enemies through walls and shoot them with explosive arrows.
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