This post got me thinking about target audience for video games when it comes to gender. Any product is targeted to a specific audience, race, gender or any other aspect that divides us into certain groups. It seems natural for video games to do the same and target a specific group of people. I have not seen that many of the big video games that are specifically targeted to female gamers, and I can only speak from my prospective but it seems that they are rather aim to a male audience. Over the years the gender distribution has shifted to a more balanced split. As seen here in female gamers have increased over the years and reached 48% in 2014.
From statista.com
It could be argue that video games do not have to specifically aim at the female audience since games allows us to get lost in a different world and become someone that we are not. So it might not be necessary for video game developers to make a conscious effort to accommodate for the different groups of people that will play the game even if that difference is gender. It could also be that there are not many women in positions of power in the video game industry, and the traditional leadership at video game studios is blind to the constant growth of the female gamer demographic.
I’m having a hard time understanding your stance or opinion on this piece. Are you trying to say that you don’t see the gaming industry aim at the female audience at all? Then yes, I would agree. The gaming industry (with the purpose of entertainment) is very one-sided in targeting the male audience over the female audience. If this weren’t the case, you would see more of a female representation in games produced by top gaming companies. Or when you do see a female representation in games, they tend to be misrepresented in a way to attract a male audience (over-sexualization is an example), but this is a different topic than what you’re trying to argue.
The point is that according to your source, there are more female gamers now than there were 9 years ago, percentage-wise but from your perspective and my own perspective, there isn’t much that’s changed when it comes to big gaming companies targeting the female audience. I agree that perhaps, not many women are in positions of power in the gaming industry to make such choices to help target the female audience. I would also like to suggest that a reason for the lack of marketing to target the female audience is because of the whole idea of “we’ve been doing this for a while and it’s still making us rich, so let’s keep doing it”. Why change something that’s already working? Another idea that I’d like to suggest is that maybe gaming industries are just completely blind to this statistic that there’s a growing percentage of female gamers.
Whatever the case may be, all I know is that if a certain game company can successfully target the female audience, then we’ll be seeing them as one of the leaders in the gaming industry very soon. One company in my mind that could accomplish this could possibly be Blizzard. Hearthstone seems to be fairly gender-neutral both in the game and in their marketing. If they were to possibly push the envelope a little more to target the female audience, then perhaps we could be seeing Hearthstone becoming even more popular than before.