[ SECRET POST #3312 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3312 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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12. http://i.imgur.com/v42amcn.png
[link for anime porn ... type stuff? I'm not even sure what's going on here]















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #473.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - posted twice ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

From a social perspective, you make sense.

From the perspective of a company whose job it is to make money, that's more difficult.

I'm not absolving the companies, but there's a financial reality there.

[feotakahari]

Counterpoint: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/18/52-percent-people-playing-games-women-industry-doesnt-know

[(Anonymous)]

Terrible counterpoint.

52% of gamers may be women, but if you're making a triple A FPS, 52% of your players are not going to be women. Not every game company makes every kind of game.

[(Anonymous)]

You're still leaving money on the table when you don't look for ways to include the 'hidden' demographic, which has been there amid male gamers for decades already anyway.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

You have... not even the slightest clue how much an additional female storyline on an AAA game would cost, right? If a game company has reason to believe that the majority of the people playing their game is male, they will often not run the risk of creating games that might possibly not appeal to that majority and that includes the protagonist's gender. As soon as including a minority of players comes at the potential cost of excluding the majority, a lot of companies are not willing to take the risk.

[(Anonymous)]

If you go by what that article considers games for gamers, then you're going to have to count every single female main character in a fashion dress up game as a "female protagonist."

The numbers even out vastly, then.

And are completely inaccurate to the state of gender dynamics in gaming.

[(Anonymous)]

I am actually completely okay with including the Style Savvy protags because those games are fucking awesome and if the US doesn't get Style Savvy 2 (it's out in Europe now), I will cry.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't mind them but counting all dress up game heroines as "female protagonist" counterpoints to the male protagonists in AAA games is disingenuous. If you did that, you could claim that the numbers are even so there's no disparity to complain about. That isn't true at all.

[(Anonymous)]

Are those games really fun?

I'd post it as a secret but I don't hide this: I'm a dude and I love dress-up doll games. It's fun to make outfits and things. Only problem is that once you make the doll, you can't do anything else with it. That's why I play F2P MMOs for a week and then forget about them. No joke.

[(Anonymous)]

We are talking about actual games here, not the smartphone crap. I wish we were the majority in pc and console games, but unfortunately we aren't.

[(Anonymous)]

take your head out of your ass and understand that mobile games are the demo now. Japan learned. We're learning.

There are actual games on phones. It's the new field. It's where the first consoles were a decade ago. It's our turn to get off the kids' lawn.

OT but...

[(Anonymous)]

NAYRT

Do I not know what a console is, because I'm pretty sure they've been around way longer than 10 years?

[caerbannog]

Hey, pocket frogs is awesome :(

+1

[(Anonymous)]

Pocket Frogs is totally awesome. I love taking them to the pond and hoping around. It's so relaxing.

[(Anonymous)]

Right? Because there's no money to be made off games you play on your phone, so they don't count when the context is companies making money off gamers. Oh wait...

[ypsilon42]

I am very reluctant to accept this kind of argument, bc coming from a purely capitalist perspective making more games for women & with female protagonists would open up a wholey untapped market. The idea that games are a medium that are inherently more appealing to men, is one that imo at least is mostly created by the existing supply and the surrounding advertising. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you create and market your games with a male audience in mind, the male audience is (almost) always going to be bigger.

(I acutally read a very intresting article about this some time ago, where a women talks to her sister about how from a certain age onwards they felt games weren't made for them. I'll try and find it, but if someone else has a link....)

[(Anonymous)]

I agree on a broad scale.

On a narrow scale of one company, are you going to be the one that takes the risk? How many will fail before the big bust happens, and are you willing to risk being one of them with shareholders breathing down your neck?

[(Anonymous)]

^ This is why indie studios are much freer to do what they want and try innovative things: they don't have a board demanding profit to answer to. Lots and lots of indie devs make interesting and unique stories and characters every day.

Expecting a huge company to spend tons of money and losing it all by doing so is unreasonable.

[ypsilon42]

Yeah, that is true especially for small companies. But considering that many video game companies are really huge with many titles a year and corresponding advertising campaigns, personally I just don't believe that this isn't connected to their own internal biases at all.

After all that is a phenonmenon that is known from a lot of branches; movies, comics, comedy, etc. When Catwomen does badly the reason is that female lead superhero movies have no market, when Batman and Robin bombs the reason is that the market is bad and so on.

[(Anonymous)]

No, it's the opposite that's true. When you put $50million into developing a game, you can't afford to have it fail. Smaller studios with less to lose have much more freedom to experiment.

[ypsilon42]

Ok, found it.

http://boingboing.net/2015/08/08/no-girl-wins-three-ways-women.html

[(Anonymous)]

The real issue is that AAA games are such big budget affairs that they just can't afford to take any risks at all.

It's possible that widening your demographic could help, but historically, that's a risk. Marketers will point at Beyond Good & Evil and Mirror's Edge, neither of which met sales expectations despite being outstanding games, and shrug their shoulders. I like to believe that they'd be wrong, but marketing and financial are never going to put "rightness" ahead of locking down profitability.

It's rubbish, but corporate will tell them that female protagonists are a risk that can't be eaten. It's the same reason that AAA games have cookie-cutter gameplay, dull interchangeable protagonists, predictable twists and highly streamlined immediacy in the gameplay.

"Is that a risk? Cool, take it somewhere else."

[(Anonymous)]

Cont.

See also: Big-budget movies that absolutely refuse to feature a female lead.

The massive inflation of budgets has created irrational risk aversion. There's a cargo cult of pointing at what has worked in the past as being the "safe option", and refusing to deviate from that by more than some minimum necessary amount.

[ypsilon42]

I'd be more sympathetic to this line of reason, if those exact game companies weren't the ones who created that exact risk in the first place, by creating a market that specifically targeted men and excluded women.

While this argument might hold up when looking at the bigger picture, it doesn't when you look at the development history of so many games. The reasons companies give for the lack of female options, or sexist outfits or and story lines range from bad to laughable. I firmly believe that doing better in these departments would lead to a bigger number of women that are intrested in games, while not overly alienateing the existing male customer base.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Games with a female protagonist have historically been handicapped in marketing budgets compared to male-protagonist or player's-choice games. So it's never been an equal comparison.