Researchers find that female PC gamers outnumber males

What were the results like? How was audience reception?

 

I don't doubt those results for mobile, although I do wonder how much the clause:

couches the results.

I would imagine much of this is also the difference with more women considering mobile their primary (probably only) gaming device.

 

After 1 month - 1300 mobile downloads (66% Android), 62 reviews (~4.2 avg). Maybe not so terrible considering I mutated the male-oriented incremental mechanic toward a female audience. For sure though, my next project will be less risky.

Gigi

 

It's cool that you can take risks, and just move on. I like that about this new indie world. Law of averages seems to dictate sooner or later you'll hit paydirt, rather than just always doing the same thing.

 

Not entirely sure why you would think incremental mechanics would be male oriented. We are basically talking about extendable skinner box mechanics. I'm sure we could head down to Reno and find a pretty solid portion of grannies on the one armed bandits.

I'm kind of tempted to say that sets of mechanics aren't ever gender specific and it's the set dressing that does more to skew the audience. CoD can be male oriented, but that doesn't mean FPS mechanics are fundamentally that way (which now makes me curious as to what the numbers for the plants vs. zombies shooter were). CoD isn't terribly interesting to women because the only interactions are "press X for hoorah" and hot lead. Compare that to Mass Effect or Fallout.

 

I don't think mechanics are gender specific either. I found this article interesting. It breaks down the gender split between console gamers and shows the top played games by sex per hardware type (mobile/handheld/console). One quote that stood out to me:

"Traditionally, it was held that male and female players acted and gamed in significantly different ways, with men gravitating to more core gaming experiences while women leaned more towards casual ones.
But in reality, this perception appears to be far from accurate - active gamers (whether they are male or female) are engaging with video games in largely the same manner. This is not to say that all men and women are gaming identically, but that the overarching pattern and their average level of investment do not differ significantly. The truly significant differences, rather, emerge along platform lines."

 

This article brings up something interesting, the notion of investment. We all have different amounts of time we can invest in gaming. For me, that time is extremely little. For some, 4 hours per day might be average.

I'm not sure this has been considered in this thread, but maybe women just spend more time on their phones?

 

I'm not picking at your ideas or anything, but I can't see the gender based connection of these points (minus the last 2), perhaps you could elaborate on what makes this a different process for the different genders?

I'm curious as it's not something I've ever considered and I'm still not convinced that it's necessary to design a game for a gender unless specifically targeting it (something I will never do).

 

The main problem with counting "gamers" nowadays is that they tend to include any and all forms of gaming, which means that it's not necessarily relevant to the public you are targeting with your game/idea.

I don't have the sources at hands, but I remember reading about this 'majority' mostly being in what we call 'mobile' and 'casual' gaming.
Not that there is anything wrong with that, neither does it imply that core games are only for males.

In the end, you always have to know your potential audience, and keep their inclinations in mind when making it.
You don't make a kid's game the same way as you would for a more complex RPG, and a mobile puzzle game also needs different things.

EDIT:
Also, you need to keep in mind that not all females like the romantic things, there are quite a few female gamers that enjoy the same gameplay, and roughly the same graphics as the males (just remember to make your males as attractive as your females).

 

I'm just developing my game as it is, without any changes. I think because it avoids pandering to either male or female, people will enjoy it more. It stays true to its objective of just being fun.

If you think too deeply about this there's a risk of making the game less fun. Sometimes your game doesn't need to fall on the side of some spectrum or other.

 

The fact that women play more games means they like what is out there already. Of course, there is always a need to find new and innovative ways to bring in more players of either gender.

Other than that, I am staying out of this conversation. Glad to see it here though.

 

Yes, I don't see it as pandering to a gender — merely considering that occasionally we, as an industry, get stuck in a rut, and it's the games that break out of that rut and do something new that will often be the most successful. Often this will be because they attract an entirely new market segment, which wasn't too interested in the same old stuff. And doing this means, if you ask your current market, they may well say "meh" about your idea.

A few examples...

• Steven Spielberg passed up a chance to invest in The Sims because he couldn't imagine that anybody would really enjoy a game about going to work and taking out the trash. (It proved to be the most profitable game of all time, up to that point, and over 50% of its players were female, which was very unusual at the time.)
• Until a few years ago, practically nobody made "casual" games — the games industry was based on big boxed titles, sold for $60 a pop, and aimed squarely at young white males. Then Zynga came along with a game about planting and raising crops, and found themselves swimming in money. (And guess what their customer gender breakdown was.) I'm oversimplifying, of course, but this was the start of the casual-game market which is now bigger than the hard-core game market, and probably largely responsible for the overall gender equity we're now seeing.
• Fighting games got more and more complex, responding to demand from their players for more complexity. As a result, their market got smaller and smaller, as most gamers found them just too hard to play. Then, along comes Super Smash Bros, with a completely different (simpler) control scheme and design that makes it more approachable. "Serious" fighting game fans sneer at it, while it makes more money than all other fighting games combined.

This is the sort of thing I'm talking about. It's not about making dress-up games or reskinning your UI in pink. It's about thinking outside the box, and taking a chance on something outside what your core market is demanding, in order to open up a new market. For years the basic principle of game design was "Have heart-pounding, non-stop action! Let players kill things and blow stuff up, the more the better, and make it hard, so they can show off their mad skillz!!!" The new markets were opened by saying, OK, now let's try something completely different.

The result isn't a "game for girls" but a game that has wider appeal in general. I myself poured hours into The Sims, and my whole family got into Farmville for a while. So did lots of other guys. Along with lots and lots of women who previously thought games were not for them (i.e., a previously untapped market).

What's interesting to me is that I think we still haven't fully learned the lesson from these success stories... over in the RTS mechanics thread, we still have people arguing that design decisions to make the game more level and approachable (e.g. random resource placement) would never work, because the serious RTS players demand a design that lets the most serious players dominate. Basically, the same argument that was made about fighting games.

Makes you wonder: if you were going to design an RTS game to have wider appeal — capture whole new segments of players that find current RTS games unappealing — how would you do it?

 

You're making a big mistake though. For every farmville there's a thousand other games that factor in female players that bomb. Possibly more than games that target male players. For reference, research the casual game market where all these games sprung from - you find plenty on www.bigfishgames.com

- they nearly all target females in some manner or other. If you think you can target a female audience and magically see a difference to your bottom line, you're terribly misguided.

If you think you can however merely just respect the gamer, now there you'll probably get somewhere

It's a little insulting for a man or woman to be told "this game is for your gender". That, there alone, causes people to rebel. You must simply make a good game instead, and if it's fun, people will come.

The casual crowd: sims, farmville - is cut throat, much more so than mainstream is.

 

@JoeStrout - If I could, I'd vote you for "I Won the Internet Today". Your whole reply is amazingly full of win!

I too struggle with this. It's hard to design for broader audiences, even with those audiences on the design team. Designing this way is not only harder and riskier, it's also harder to learn from mistakes so we can do better next time. Like, with Tap Happy, it's hard to decipher which parts of the design failed. Maybe it's: too simple; had a confusing design; was too niche; suffered from programmer art; or wasn't fun. Maybe, it did pretty well in a world of 1000 new apps per day. And, yet, maybe, we did a poor job designing for broader appeal. The feedback loop is quite muddy.

Gigi

 

Never mind the fact that it's dominated much more by advertising money and is a largely boom or bust market.

At the end of the day, the most important thing is to know your audience. It's easy to be tempted by large numbers to chase, but chances are you will be more "successful" if you actually make something for people you can put names to. I would much rather make a game for people I could meet at a conference and shake hands with than some filthy casuals (the irony of the con funk sufferer is not lost on me) who probably won't be worth much anyway.

 

There's always looking to games that have been widely popular with everybody, what can be learned from those? Targeting anyone is mutually exclusive by nature, right?

What pleases everyone? For starters, humor. Cute things. To some degree sex sells, even when it's not vulgar or offensive... like Batman. Men find him awesome, women find him sexy. So Batman makes a good movie/game.

And so on.

 

Indeed. Making design decisions based on an arbitrary binary separation is limiting at best and exclusionary at worst.

 

And it seems like a knee-jerk reaction for us.

 

Both of which are too subjective to please everyone.

 

Well, if you were slap a new face on it (Quite. Literally.) and have a different art theme, say... pastels and little icons of birds or something, and try something like letting people use the points to purchase decorations for a little zen garden or something, what would stop you from rereleasing it?

There's a market for a therapeutic game filled with life affirming truths, I'm sure of it.

Just because the particular execution wasn't a smash hit, doesn't mean the inspiration was wrong.

I did play it, I liked smashing my fingers on the screen. I have been having pain in my hands from typing so much lately, pain is gone today.

Something to think about, maybe?

 

Not everyone has the same taste in animals. I'm not a big fan of ducklings, but I do like puppies and kittens. Does that mean that I should talk to a professional? No. It simply means I have different tastes.

As for a sense of humor, I tend to like slapstick humor though occasionally I like word play. I do not like crude humor though and will purposefully avoid it.

You cannot please everyone. That's just how it is going to be.

 

It's just my personal opinion and I don't specifically think it pertains to the discussion, but I guess I'll just have to not write it entirely, since I really don't think there's any logic in arguing about an opinion and apparently that's what's going to happen.

My apologies.

 

That's just it. We all have our personal opinions on what we like. It pertains because you are suggesting to make things that everyone likes, but neither of your examples are necessarily universal.

I would rather build a game that I know I would enjoy playing and hope that other gamers enjoy it too. If not, there are tons of other games available.

 

It was dark, dry humor about living in a world of people with no sense of humor. The irony, the irony...

 

Very dry apparently. Though I have to say, whoever took that picture really doesn't know how to use a camera.

 

My sense of humor is like the Sahara Desert at night.

Nice save. Lol

 

I know I said I was staying out of this but I have an interesting observation that shouldn't be too controversial. Last night, we were star gazing with some friends. One of them is a math professor at a local liberal arts college. Her husband and daughter are gamers. He happens to be currently playing some AAA superhero game.

We started talking about games and she told me she does not find many games interesting in the long term. As a math whiz, she figures out the formulas pretty quickly and then finds the games very boring. In fact, her nose crinkled up with disgust as she described the typical game. Her husband argued with her about how he loved achieving things in the game and the release it gave him after a difficult day. He didn't care about the "formula" and didn't mind the repetitiveness of the game.

This has more to do with our way of looking at the world rather than gender. She is a mathematician, skilled with numbers and formulas. He is more creative and likes the thrill and the story. Interestingly enough, their teenage daughter wants a game that is more open and creative, with no classes. One that allows her to explore and grow her own character. She happens to be a talented ballerina (like majorly gifted).

If one pulls things into their games that might appeal to all these people OR creates a niche game that really focuses on features that will pull one of them to their game, they could do well, regardless of gender. I think it might benefit us more to think of gaming styles and personalities rather than gender or even age. I am going to go after that teenager. She is the perfect gamer for our game.

 

I'm not going to say that I'm any kind of wizard or anything, but I tend to find patterns extremely quickly as well and all that jazz. This results in boredom not just of games, but also in life... where certain types of people even follow certain behavioral patterns, etc. Everything has a degree of predictability. So, why hide it? Shmups and Beat 'em ups say, "Go ahead and find the pattern, you're still going to die!" I like that. It surprises me how many ways there are to die in games that take no interest whatsoever in whether or not you complete the game. I just thought I'd reply to that because the argument of "games are simple, so I don't play them" has a strong counter argument. Play games that require persistence and eye-hand coordination and are basically programmed to do unexpected things. I rarely complete games because of the pattern/formula thing. I rarely complete shmups and beat 'em ups because I'm not good enough.

So yes, there is definitely a game for everybody, and there's a lot more than gender going on. We still haven't really dissected any majorly successful games in this thread, not extensively at least.