mrstickball said:
Correct. I don't think many would argue that Nintendo hasn't done more for the female gaming crowd than MS and Sony combined. And that's been the problem: New genres and games have emerged over the past 5-6 years that target female gamers more than ever before. The secret of this decade has been that it's the decade of the female gamer. I'd venture to bet that in the 90's, the typical console demo was 90% male, and 10% female...While it's now getting closer to 60/40 in favor of males. The secret isn't that men are shying away from gaming, but Female are taking their rightful place as counterparts in the gaming community. And why this surge? Not because their preferences have changed, but Nintendo, primarily, marketed towards them. Another good example, I think, of a 3rd party really reaching out to them would be the music & rhytmn games like Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and Singstar. I've regularly seen women fighting over control of the game because it was intuitive, and something they enjoyed. And guess what? Rock Band and Guitar Hero supercede many big franchises in terms of revenue like Madden. Every company needs a balanced strategy to get both male and female gaming audiences, just like the movies do. Not every movie is targeted to a 50/50 male/female audience, with 50/50 being over/under 30 years of age. Some moives, like a Crank 2, are absolutely designed for male audiences, while anything with Matthew McCaughahey (SP?) is probably catering to ladies....Is that a bad thing? No. Because theater dollars don't change if a guy or girl spends them. Hopefully game companies are learning the same thing. And I don't think it really just comes down to genres, but style choices, and making games intuitive. Kingdom Hearts is pretty popular among females I know, but it's still a pretty solid RPG. Kudos to SE about stylizing it to garner a bigger, more inclusive audience. Even under Wagamama Fashion: Girls Mode lies a very solid business simulator...It's just covered in glitter and beads. |
Throughout most of the NES and SNES generation the split between male and female gamers was fairly even, and at the end of the generation (and through the following generation) there was an increasing focus on teenage and young adult male gamers. There are many reasons for this shift, but the core reason was that as games pushed to be more complicated and story driven few games targeted at girls and women were successful on home consoles ... Many of their attempts were particularly poor, and many publishers believed that objectified female lead characters in action-oriented violent videogames would appeal to women (which was a foolish assumption).
Women and girls didn't (entirely) give up on gaming, but their focus shifted to different areas which are rarely paid attention to. Several years ago, when Nintendo was about to launch the Gameboy Advance, one of their claims was that 60% of Gameboy owners were female and over 50% of those girls were above the age of 21. The PC has also remained a fairly decent refuge for female gamers over that period as companies (like Pop-Cap games, and Games Cafe) have produced simple games that were heavily targeting female gamers for quite some time.
