Naughty Dog insisted on female testers for The Last of Us

April 9, 2013 12:03AM PDT

By Dan Chiappini, Editor of GameSpot AU

The marketing company responsible for focus testing the apocalyptic game ignored female gamers; suggested removing Ellie from box art.

The Last of Us was originally only intended to be focus tested on a male audience, Naughty Dog creative director Neil Druckman revealed in an interview with The Escapist.

The oversight came not from the studio creating the game, but rather a seemingly "girls don't play video games" attitude from an unnamed research firm given the job of managing focus testing during development.

 

 

"Another aspect that influences how a game is promoted is focus testing. Players are rounded up and are asked to view materials and answer some quantitative and qualitative questions about it," Druckman explained. "My big surprise during this process [was] that the research group wasn't planning on focus testing female gamers--it's something we had to specifically request. I hope this is a relic of the past that will soon go away."

The article went on to suggest that the marketing firm even allegedly went as far as to recommended moving co-main character Ellie to the back of the game box. Naughty Dog ignored the advice, instead placing her alongside Joel on the front of the game’s packaging.

The Last of Us was previously scheduled to arrive on May 7, but was last month delayed five weeks to a June 14 launch. Naughty Dog explained at the time that due to the "massive" nature of the game's story, the extra development time was needed to "ensure every detail" was up to the developer's standards.

A demo for The Last of Us is in the works, with owners of God of War: Ascension receiving first access.

For more on The Last of Us, check out GameSpot's previous coverag

Kitchens in TLOU will be top of the line confirmed!

I kid I kid I hope these practices go away as well, makes no sense to not have female gamers as part of a focus group..especially for a game like TLOU where one of the main characters is a female as well

I swear all these stuff about focus testing and box arts really makes me wonder about the people behind em. Pushing for guns to be on box arts + the whole FUSE fiasco for example

What is going on with Fuse?

Remember how it looked like when it was initially revealed? They called it Overstrike

They basically went from this

to this

They changed the whole look of the game due to focus groups. Now it looks like a generic mess with no personality. The game is heading for a huge bomba status.

There was/is a huge backclash from gamers on the topic...it's pretty similar to what happened with the new Dante in DMC

Dont tell me this marketing firm is resposible for a lot of Sony's marketing.

Reminds me of Perfect Dark Zero in the first picture.  I havent heard about any of this though.  I actually havent seen any gameplay Fuse or anything though.  I am going to play it just because it is insomniac though.  Ratchet and Clank has been good and I was a big fan of Spyro growing up as well. I know a lot of people are kind of mixed with Resistance but in my opinion Resistance 3 is one of the best single player FPS games.  The gameplay is really unique and interesting.

@bold: Definitely agree..I really enjoyed it

There's plenty of FUSE gameplay out now if you check youtube. It looks ok really, didn't really excite me or anything. But yeah insomniac got a lot of heat over this..a little too much if you ask me. I hope the game does well as they are good good devs and deserve the success..but I don't think it will do all that well