A console made for girls. Would you buy it?

[DonFerrari]

SuperNova said:

DonFerrari said:

If games before Wii/DS weren't largely targeted at a specific gender why would them the console ownership be so much bigger along boys?

I didn't say they didn't target a specific gender, where did you get that from? I said they largely didn't target a female audience. Video games were largely seen as a boys toy and targeted that market predominently, starting with the 80s. That trend lasted untl the Wii/DS. Of course you will find the occasional attempt at a game (or even entire console) marketed at girls, wich got tracktion in the mid 90s but that didn't reflect the majority of the market yet.

Pong was still sold as a family game and by virtue of that the Magnavox Odyssey was sold as a family system/toy.

But by the late 70s the arcade scene was on the rise though and through a complex web of circumstances, wich include cans of worms like genetical predisposition, societal norms, the sexual revolution and other way broader topics wich are relevant as to why it happened the way it happened, most of the programmers for early Arcade and home computer games ended up being teenaged boys.

People will try to make what appeals to them, especially without any outside forces to persuade them otherwise. So just by virtue of most of the developers themselves being teeaged boys, the target group ended up being teenaged boys as well. It was a working system and it stuck around for a while.

There's outliers for sure, two big ones being all of Sierras games as well as tetris, wich both had broader audiences, Tetris being one of the first major games to hit the mainstream since Pong, wich means it reached older and female gamers. Consoles themselves did a lot to broaden the gaming audience as well, through sheer accessibility. All of those factors led to a rise in female gamers, wich eventually got noticed and served.

Unfortunately a lot of purely 'female targeted' games are utter shovel-ware garbage to this day, wich is why I said in the first place just targeting one gender is dumb and ideally you should strive for as broad an audience as possible.

Sorry but until SNES era games, be arcade or consoles there weren't processing power to portray anything more than simplistic non-gender (sure there were those odds porn games on Atari) games. Pong, Pinball and others as you even mentioned weren't targeted at boys.

Even so research verified that most of the public was male anyway, so there was when their marketing focused more on boys. And not to forget for every claim of societal norm shunning girls from playing it also shunned male over 12 year old or so, that didn't prevent boys that started playing way back to keep playing even with the stigma.

It is much more under genetical predisposition to compete than targeting a specific public.

Even to this day a lot of games that are quite neutral still have males dominated on consoles and PC with other neutral titles on smarphone and facebook with female players. Candy Crush and the like doesn't have anything feminine on them still that is dominated by female players.

For the good or the bad even if your marketing doesn't target a public by gender the people who will resonate with the game won't change. Even so we will have great fans and players from female side on franchises like RE and SF.