DonFerrari said:
SuperNova said:
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.
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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.
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Yes, I specifically contrasted PONG, as a game marketed as a family oriented game (aka not specifically marketed at boys, family toghether in front of the TV, equal number of male and female people playing, etc.) with the later wave of 80s and early 90s games that were predominantly marketed to, made for and often by teeaged boys. That was the whole point.
There are whole genres predominantly aimed at a male audience through presentation (while still being enjoyed by some women, these games are not made with them in mind), and these genres dominated the arcade. Shooters, brawlers, sport tiltels, racing sims and fighters had overwhelmingly male character options, gory depictions of violence (for the time) accompanied by fast paced action gameplay.
But even back in those days the breakout hits, like pacman worked becouse they had cross-over appeal and weren't audience limiting (Pacman in particular was famous for it's big female audience, hence why they made MS. Pacman, to better cater to that market). That's why they were big hits. But again they weren't the norm.
And from what I can tell, you seem to agree with me on that, but think that gender specific preferences to certain genres are genetically predisposed and have little to nothing to do with presentation...ok.
Honestly I don't think either of us is educated or smart enough to make such a detailed nature vs. nurture call and all you're doing here is guessing.
What we have presedence and proof for are marketing and sales trends and they prove that if your console is accessible and marketed at all genders you will end up selling more to older and female gamers as well as just more overall.
Honestly I'm not quite sure what we are discussing at this point or what you are taking issue with in the first place, but his has as good as nothing to do with my initial post, wich basically said:
'Female gamers in te early 90s were a largely untapped market. It makes sense to want to cater to that market (blue ocean) to release previously untapped sales potential. This company (Casio) who chose stickers and bad model party gamesas well as an overtly gendered approach to do that, was dumb and another company (namely nintendo) did it better and more sublty, while actually doing reseach any analyzing what attracts female gamers.
I feel like none of that is really up for debate.
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