I'm gonna go find that article and downvote your comment hurr durr. Jk, it's not a big deal. Always great to see new IPs succeed.

The gender of the protagonist matters little, only marketing and quality, get those right and you have big sales. The last of Us part 2 and Resident Evil 2 also sold a lot, which also has female protagonists. Most Final fantasy games also had male and female protagonist and sold quite well.

You can basically play almost the whole of Final fantasy 7 remake as a girl if you want, not too mention the plethora of games you can choose to play as a female, (pretty much all recent Pokémon games, all soul games etc). Hell the female Pokémon player is more iconic if it's just sales based.

However more sales doesn't automatically mean iconic. Lara Croft has starred in a lot of games and is still way more iconic as female heroïne than Aloy. Same way Superman is more iconic as a superhero than let's say Spiderman. Even though the latter has caught up commercially and is definitely more popular lately.

Aloy is still a good protagonist though and we should of course value and celebrate more strong female protagonists. However I don't think Alloy is anywhere near as iconic as tomb raider, perhaps in 10 years. I would go as far to say that Seamus is even more iconic, (mostly thanks to Smash).

We shouldn't forget that most PlayStation and Xbox players are probably still white males, so it's also pretty normal that companies tried to cater to that audience. Not everything needs to be exactly 50/50, woman protagonist are a bit more common now as are female gamers who play big AAA games It's not a new invention or something that never happened before. The strength of Horizon is also that it doesn't make a big deal of it in itself.

I don’t think this is accurate. In fact I would argue that Sony has actually really struggled over the last 20 years to have any IPs that have break through pop culture success that their competitors have had. Virtually all non video game players can tell you who Mario is, who Zelda and Link are, who Pikachu is. Hell, I would imagine a good portion of them know who Master Chief is, at least vaguely as the “halo guy” if nothing else.

Lara Croft had that breakthrough success, where even non game players know who she is. I don’t think that has yet happened for a PlayStation IP in the last 15 years. That does not speak at all to the quality of the games they output, just that for whatever reason they have struggled to break out of the PlayStation ecosystem. I know a number of guys that are life long PC gamers that I would consider relatively “plugged in” to games culture that couldn’t tell you who Aloy is.

I think Sony is aware of this which is why they are trying to break so many of their IP out of the PlayStation console culture bubble

Who's Aloy? Chips Ahoy? Tomb Raider came at a perfect time in video game culture. Sales are not the same as impact on culture esp compared from two very different periods in gaming. Lara was everywhere. Not just games or movies, commercials. Freaking Playboy when that was a big deal. It was gaming news when a new model would play her in public events. She was truly Iconic. Aloy is not. the game sold well. Ok yeah in modern gaming. She's not everywhere. She's not popping up in all sorts of other media. Lara was one of the icons that represented a decade. Aloy represents nothing but her own game. Outside of PS fans, hardly anyone knows who TF Aloy is. How many games these days feature tough badass women? A million esp from western devs. Lara was one of the first to bring a tough BA woman into 3D. Before that most female playable game characters were in Bikinis with swords or extremely Japanese games so were more niche. One exception is Metroid but Samus is covered in armor.

I don't like the LC games at all. I thought they were clunky as hell then and only aged worse now. But saying Aloy is as known as LC is a joke.

Both of them are iconic women for sure... but neither of them can touch the baddest woman in gaming history: Samus Aran.

That one subjective word set the tone for everything else.  Not sure why you care so much if other people agree with your opinion.  Throw it out there, defend it and even if no one agrees so what.  The problem would be to dismiss reasoned disagreements or get upset.  At the end of the day, no one really changes their opinion and only you know fully what you mean, everyone else can only interpret and most times its not going to always be on point.

Anyway you should revel in having the minority opinion.

Give it another decade. The Horizon franchise still needs time to grow, whether it be through another mainline game, VR spinoffs, an MMO, a television series, cameos in other games, comic books, toys, etc.

A lot of people that don't play games know about Lara Croft.

Basically no one outside of the gaming sphere know about Aloy.

It's not about game sales it's about brand recognition and Lara Croft/Tomb Raider is still a much stronger brand.

If it takes another decade then it again proves OP wrong. Lara was popular and in pop culture very quickly and ruled the 90s. TR came out in 94 and by 2000 with several games Larawas a gaming Icon as big as any of them at that time. HZD is 5 years old. Didn't hit that status. Not going to either. Lara hit at a different time in pop culture.

I am disappoint, I came to this thread for this