I've been playing video games since I was knee-high to a duck. One of my first memories of my father was him showing me, a kid just emerging from toddlerhood, how far he had gotten in Super Mario Bros. during my weekends with him. I've had so much time in the gaming community that I've met all types of people, because all types of people play video games.
A portion of these gamers are women, though it's not a large portion. The gaming community is around 25 percent female on average, if you toss out casual match-3 games you find on mobile. Gaming has been predominantly male for ages, and the women who got into it did so because their personalities just so happened to vibe with the space or, in many cases, the type of game they like playing.
For instance, you'll find quite a few female gamers playing Family/Farm Sim games like Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, and The Sims. Social simulation and system management are massive draws for female gamers. As you get into games like First-Person Shooters and War Sims, the female player base starts to thin out pretty drastically. There are still some there, but that's just not many women's cup of tea.
And that's completely fine. There's something in the gaming space for everyone.
But then you see articles like this one from VideoGamesChronicles.com that report on a "study" by Ampere Analysis on how females are an "overlooked opportunity" for industry growth:
Female players represent 48% of the gaming population – around 922 million players – across 21 markets, Ampere says. “But at such a large scale, this 4% difference does represent 93 million fewer female gamers [than male],” senior analyst Katie Holt said during a presentation held today.
This represents a gap in the market that could be considered “a missed opportunity, with potential to increase monetisation and engagement,” Ampere says.
Before I continue, I want to point out that this 48 percent number includes women who have a "match-3" game on their phone, like Candy Crush. These are games that are usually there for random bouts of amusement and don't really require dedication. You'll often find that many in the gaming community toss this stat away when discussing the gaming community, as these aren't considered "gamers" any more than succulent collectors are considered farmers.
VGC says that the reason many female players aren't getting into other genres of games more is that they lack the elements that would make them interested, and this is where the real point of the article finally comes to light:
Holt explained that by studying what themes and content appeal to female players, developers can not only introduce them to the medium, but also better integrate them into existing titles that may have more male-heavy player bases.
Let me translate this, because this is a clever way of disguising what is ultimately a leftist agenda item.
What they're saying here isn't that they need to better educate female players to understand these games, so that more people play them; what they're saying is that developers need to include elements and change games so that they're more likely to attract female players.
This is a stupid plan, and it's proven to be a stupid one before.
Disney decided to do this with Marvel not that long ago. They took what was a predominantly male brand and decided to start changing things within it to appeal to women. What they ended up creating was slop that appealed to neither sex, and really only attracted people with a certain socio-political bent. They lost so much of their audience and the money that went with it that they had to pivot and bring back their heavy hitters to try to revitalize the brand.
The trap here is trading depth for accessibility, and if it didn't work for Disney, it's definitely not going to work for any video game developer. The game will be too shallow for its playerbase, and still too busy for the casual gamers who only want to play simple puzzle games or pick digital crops. It's not going to work.
It's especially not going to work for the women who, though in a smaller minority, enjoy games that males typically do. These women appreciate the way things are and how they're made now, and suddenly pulling focus on what makes the game so fun to implement things that corporations think women want will ruin the experience for women just as much as it does for men.
It's Marvel all over again.
These "analysts" have either one of two issues.
Either they're so deep in the numbers that they're not seeing the big picture... or they know exactly what they're doing, and they're more agenda-focused than anything else.
