[ 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

[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, then I guess I am just not willing to believe that a good game that offers a female option and has a good advertising campaign would always make less money.

[(Anonymous)]

But it often will and has proven to in the past, and giant companies are not willing to take the risk.

Listen, nobody here is disagreeing with you that some of them should, ideally. They are telling you that none of them will and for very practical reasons on their side too.

[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.

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

I totally agree that it's of their own making. The cause of the problem isn't really at issue. If someone is sinking $100 million into a game, a firm belief is never going to trump a misguided focus group, even if that focus group is the product of twenty years of gaming advertising aimed to condition a particular response.

It's a bad outcome all around; it leads to every kind of inequality in casting and characters, it stifles creativity and encourages bad design. It's even worse in films, when they've even given up on making new plots, and subsist near-entirely on remakes and sequels. None of this is good, but it's helpful to understand why it happens.

[ypsilon42]

I understand why it happens. But, I think that is also why it frustrates me so much? Like, I understand that the male dominated culture in gaming is mostly artificially created by developers and advertising. But then women ask for games to be more inclusive and developers will tell them, that it is just not possible because of the market or maybe just because women are too hard to animate and then they turn around and continue to perpetuate that same culture that prevents that market from developing.

And while I am willing to admit that it would be impossible to change the market over the course of one single season, I think it would easily be possible for them to do more (like offering a female option in more games or not having chain mail bikinis) without risking bankruptcy.

Plus, if you look at the specific discussion of games you often see that the developers themselves don't see how artificial the market really is and/or how their personal conservatism drives their decision. And at least imo part of the change is totally prevented by this instead of actual business decisions. (Not a gaming example but from the top of my head there is the entire action figure debacle concerning Black Widow and Rey.)

[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.

[world_eater]

this. they don't even receive half of the marketing budget.


ADDITIONALLY when people tried to studies on how well female protagonist-centred games there were not enough games to draw any meaningful conclusions.


i have some of those studies somewhere because we actually had classes about this. i also have an XBOX live statistic where women make up 40(? don't quote me)% of the users. that is not a neglible percentage and has nothing to do with fashion dress up games or candy crush. don't ask me to dig them up it's 10am and i haven't slept. maybe later