Nintendo: Switch Buyers Are Primarily Men In Their 20s/30s

[pokoko]

Jaicee said:

I wish Nintendo (and everyone other than just Sony for that matter) would try appealing to women more often too. It seems like over the last year and a half especially, Nintendo has almost gone out of their way focus on pandering to male players, like with eliminating Samus Aran from Metroid: their only female-centric franchise. They had a back-up opportunity in that there proved to be large demand from female players (myself included) for making Link female in BoTW after the game's first trailer was released years in advance of the game itself. They had plenty of time to consider the option. But, using BS excuses like this one...

"You know there’s the idea of the Triforce in the Zelda games we make. The Triforce is made up of Princess Zelda, Ganon and Link. Princess Zelda is obviously female. If we made Link a female we thought that would mess with the balance of the Triforce. That’s why we decided not to do it." [Pro tip: two-thirds male, including the player character, is not "balance." ]

...they opted instead to make it another standard damsel in distress narrative. It's almost like they're going out of their way to drive away female players, like we don't even matter to them.

By contrast, you've seen Sony publish a fairly large number of female-centric titles of the same period, including all three (wow, what a huge number!) of the AAA ones I'm aware of that were/are slated for this year that I'm aware of. I mean I realize that it's always commercially safer to focus on your established market for a while initially and everything, but still it would be nice to know that one of the gaming hardware companies that's not Sony wanted my money and loyalty too. Nintendo used to care. A little. It's too bad they obviously don't anymore.

I don't agree with demands to conform and change pre-existing works in order to make one demographic happy.  That seems awfully selfish to me.  Should I be angry with Sony because I want to play a male character in the Horizon world?  Should I refuse to play games where a female player rescues a male player because it doesn't fit my perspective?

That being said, I think you should continue to tell game publishers what you like and want in terms of creative direction.  Tell them you want more female main characters and that you want different dynamics than the "damsel in distress" trope.  But demanding that creative properties that already exist need to pander to the least represented slice?  I don't like that.  It's not fair to the people who enjoy the work in its present form.  

Think of something you like a lot then imagine if the company that makes it said, "well, we're going to change it because this group over here is less represented than you and they want something else--sorry, but you're not as important because there are more of you than them."