Are Video Games Finally Starting to Reflect Their Audience?

Video game producers are becoming more aware of their audience, including women both playing video games and those in them.
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The video game industry hasn’t done a great job with women, either in the audience or in the games themselves. The sexualization of female characters is pretty well documented, but it’s actually trending down, at least for playable characters. A recent poll found that games featuring playable women characters–not secondary or background characters–are treating those women as characters and not as sex objects. They looked at games published between 1983 and 2014 and found that sexualized playable women peaked in the 1990s, the hey-day of the old Tomb Raider games, and has been declining since 2007. The recent Tomb Raider games, in which Lara Croft isn’t treated as a sex symbol, are an excellent example of this.

So what difference does this make? Well for one, it’s probably pushing sales. Women make up about half of the game buying market, a fact which makes the near constant marketing of games to young, straight white men ludicrous. A move toward more realistic and well-rounded women characters is bound to draw in more women to buy those games, especially if they’re tired of playing grizzled white men, which are pretty much the default protagonists in mainstream video games.

The study didn’t find that women who aren’t playable, whether they’re allies, enemies, or damsels in distress, are any less sexualized, though, and that’s not going to help sell those games to women. The Grand Theft Auto franchise, for example, includes plenty of strippers and prostitutes, but has yet to include a single playable woman character. Fighting games like Dead or Alive or Street Fighter remain the bastion of sexualized playable characters, with an audience that seems to be predominantly male, but probably isn’t in reality.

As the reality of audience demographics finally sinks in for various publishers, chances are the industry will continue to take note and continue taking steps toward games that appeal to a wider portion of their audience.

Disney to Cease Self-Publishing Video Games

 

Walt Disney is getting out of the video game industry. At least, they will no longer be self-publishing titles, although they’re going to continue licensing their properties to other developers. The announcement, which came on April 10th, came as a surprise to a lot of people, especially after they were talking about how strong that unit of the company was only four months ago. When you consider that Disney Infinity had quickly risen to the top spot in the “toys-to-life” model of video games. That model involves selling players a game, and then small figures that, when connected through a peripheral, allow them to use the characters represented in the game itself. Activision started the ball rolling with Skylanders back in 2011, and LEGO recently joined in with LEGO Dimensions.

But that business model is slowing down, and it has a lot of cost wrapped up in it. It seems like Disney is backing out just as the format is losing its steam, out of a fear that the initial hurdles will end up being too much after all. It’s certainly the safer path than waiting for the title to start failing and losing money.

It’s not the first time Disney has proclaimed their strength and then backed out of self-publishing video games. In 2011 they stopped making console games to focus on mobile games, despite their very successful release of Epic Mickey. But console gaming is a tough business, and big publishers like Activision or Electronic Arts have been at this for years, figuring out how to do things in many cases over multiple generations of consoles. It’s probably a safer bet for Disney to just let other publishers handle their properties while they focus on continuing to develop (or purchase) desirable properties in the first place.

GameStop to Publish their First Video Game

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In a continued attempt to keep themselves afloat, GameStop, the largest video game retailer in the country, is making the jump to publishing. They’re starting with one game, called Song of the Deep, which is being developed by Insomniac Games, a studio known for Ratchet and Clank and other games. Insomniac has a respected pedigree, one with quite a few fans, which will probably help the game sell, and it will be released for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, on disc for all three.

That’s the kicker right there, the “on disc” part. Last year, digital video game sales totaled around $61 billion, while they only hit about $5 billion in retail stores. For gamers who use computers, digital purchases are the way to go, not only because they’re easier and often cheaper, but because an increasing number of computers don’t even have disc drives. Physical media is dying, at least as PCs are concerned.

For console games, physical media is still around, although those systems increasingly release content only in digital form. By keeping the game purely physical, GameStop insures that they get those sales, but how many sale is that going to bring in? The game, which will drop in Q2 2016 for $15, a price comparable to digital independent games, might not be enough to bring people into the store who might not otherwise shop there. GameStop does have 43 million PowerUp Rewards members, and 7 million subscribers to the print magazine Game Informer, but there are also a lot of gamers who don’t like the store, and don’t shop there if they can avoid it.

It’s an interesting gambit, and one which they’re taking slowly and carefully. GameStop has made no attempt to interfere with the development process, which should make fans happy, and they’re not planning to publish anything else until they see how this goes.

Fallout 4 Biggest Video Game of the Year, Sets Sales Record

 

Fallout 4, a post-apocalyptic video game of grand proportions, was one of the most anticipated games of 2015, and that anticipation was evident when it the game was released on November 10. In just 24 hours, Fallout 4 generated $750 million in sales for publisher Bethesda, which is part of ZeniMax Media. Those sales dwarf Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, which was released earlier that month and raked in $550 million in 72 hours.

While the Call of Duty series is the most widely played franchise in the world, those games tend to have short single player experiences, and are kept afloat by their multiplayer community. They tend to drop off in popularity pretty quickly, and once the next game in the series, or anything else with a significant multiplayer experience comes along, their sales drop. Activision releases those games like clockwork though, so the model seems to be working.

Bethesda takes a different approach. They’re best known for role-playing games with deep storylines, large casts, and lots of player freedom. Before they got the rights to the Fallout franchise, which started in the 1990s on PCs, they were best known for their Elder Scrolls franchise, which is still popular. Fallout 3, the first Bethesda game in the series, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, not only all earned numerous accolades and were commercial successes, they have retained loyal fans who still swear by those games today.

Bethesda also announced Fallout 4 a mere five months before it hit shelves, which is a pretty short period for a video game. They had been developing the game in secret for years, allowing them to announce it, generate buzz and preorders, and then release it on time, and with few game-breaking bugs. Considering the franchise’s popularity, the sales, and positive critiques of the game, Fallout 4 stands to set a lot more records in the industry.

Adult Women Play More Video Games Than Anyone Else

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has released a recent study that proves something that some of us have been suspecting for a while now: adult women are the single largest demographic among people who play video games. This will likely come as a shock to some men, and it will assuredly be greeted with bile by some of the sexist pigs that like to think they own gaming, but the ESA has done a lot more research than them.

Real quickly, the numbers break down like this. 52% of people who play video games are women, while 32% of players are aged 18-35, and 39% are 36 or older. That means that women over the age of 18 represent 36% of video game players, while boys under 18, generally considered the “target demographic” only represent 17% of game players. Another fun fact, the number of women 50 or older who play video games increased by 32% between 2012 and 2013.

This reflects a broadening of who plays video games across the spectrum. While back in the day young players may have dominated video game demographics, those players grew up, and they’re still playing video games. More over, their parents are playing video games as well. Social media and mobile platforms, namely smart phones, have had a lot to do with the widening demographic of players. The so-called “casual games” are still video games, and they exist on platforms that are more welcoming to a wider variety of people. Not everyone has, or wants, an XBOX, but how many people have smart phones, or Facebook accounts, or both?

All of this should be very interesting to video game publishers, especially the larger companies that have routinely ignored women gamers, sometimes explicitly removing women from box art to not “alienate the core demographic.” According to the study, the average adult woman gamer has been playing games for 13 years, well before Candy Crush or even the introduction of games on Facebook. It’s time to take those women seriously.