Games with Female Leads- The Controversy

The news these days has caused a bit of an uproar. Generally, I try not to get involved in factors like this, but I thought right now I may possibly attempt to interpret items.

I feel it’s a excellent concept to commence out by saying that it is all about the cash. It appears apparent, but you have to truly take it on board before something else can start to make any sense. We cannot envision fat-cat suited producers sitting at their mahogany desks surrounded by strippers and bragging about there getting no female faces on the bills they stuff into, ahem, crevices

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The arrow really adds a lot to this graph.

These guys are not sexist. Or possibly they are. But it doesn’t matter to them. It's about cash. Their investigation need to show that female-lead games make less money. They appear at a binder of figures. Games with female leads and their income vs similar games with male leads. The binder almost certainly had fancy graphs and pie charts.

So when I set out to look into this debacle, I felt certain that I would learn a considerable distinction among related games with male leads versus female.

Ahead of we get into analyzing distinct video games, I want to clarify that I will be adjusting sales figures by years. The way I am going to do this is, since the industry has grown each and every year since 2005, I’ll be adjusting the sales accordingly to correspond with overall market development over time

Have a look at this graph for a far better understanding. Missing from this is the year 2005, the year that God of War came out, so I learned from one more site that 2005 market figure was ~27.67 billion.

Here are the games we are going to compare and my reasoning behind the comparisons: 

Mirror’s Edge and Prince of Persia. Both cross-platform, each acrobatic themed action/adventure.

Portal and Halo three: ODST. Both spin-offs of hugely, hugely successful franchises. Each short. The obvious difficulty with this comparison is that Portal gameplay appeals to a smaller niche than ODST’s. We’ll have to use our imaginations a bit right here.

Heavenly Sword and God of War. Both PlayStation exclusives. Each slash’emup actions.

So let’s begin the comparison. Prince of Persia, a male-lead game, that came out in 2008, shows sales of 1.98 million.

Mirror’s Edge, whose lead is a female, apparently sold two.two million because its 2007 release. Adjusted to reflect the 13% increase to the business from 2007 to 2008, we may envision sales of ~two.48 million. Here, the female protagonist (also amazingly not a portion of a pre-existing franchise!) has the (grinning wildly right here) Edge.

Let’s look at the next pair. The 2007 game Portal, in 2011, reported sales nearing 4 million, so I’m going to safely round up to an even four. This does not consist of Steam sales, evidently.

Meanwhile Halo three: ODST has apparently sold an extraordinary 6.13 million because 2009.

But, adjusting Portal’s figures into 2009*, and the puzzling game gets a 21% enhance to 4.84 million.

In millions. Duh.

In simple numbers, ODST is the clear winner. Nonetheless, I believe most would agree that the FPS genre is typically constantly going to beat the experimental Puzzle genre.

Lastly, the final two. Heavenly Sword shows 1.57 million, and was released in 2007. God of War, 2005, shows 4.617*. Let’s adjust. God of War’s currently staggering figure gets an boost of 40%, bringing its number to six,463,800. Kratos did more than 4 occasions far better than its female rival.

But of course, there are some unanswered questions right here. How considerably does getting sequels influence the sales of the initial game? What percentage of a games total sales are made in the first year (unless its almost all, as I envision, all of these numbers are worthless.)? How a lot income was spent on marketing per dollar earned in male games vs female? What are the budgets of these games?

Nonetheless, I believe there are some fairly exciting conclusions to draw from the above numbers. 1st off, even without the adjustment, all of these games met with at least reasonable success. While it appears three million+ is the best quantity for AAA producers, I am positive they can be somewhat happy with only 2. (Producer gets 30% on a $ 60 game times two mil= $ 36mil).

I have to say that I was rather shocked to come up with these relatively positive benefits. In each case here, the female protagonist seemed to make no difference on whether or not the game sold well. The only arguable failure was Heavenly Sword and I doubt there are numerous individuals operating around claiming that was breaking any new ground for females in video games.

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*This gets iffy- naturally not all of Portal's sales had been produced in 2007, but with out becoming able to see a breakdown year-by-year, I had to just run a easy adjustment.

**I never know how significantly of those numbers are just from that year. It seems absurd to picture such a huge quantity for the game when Portal took almost 4 years to even get close.