So if I am not wrong, with today's news I believe Horizon Zero Dawn is now one of the best selling female lead game of all time after having sold over 10 million copies ( as per officially communicated data ).
https://www.polygon.com/2019/2/28/18244721/horizon-zero-dawn-sales-ps4
Fantastic that GG rightfully decided to go with a female protagonist. Now no more excuses for more Publishers to push for more female leads in games and not just in multiplayer but also single player games.
Come on Rockstar, do the right thing here. If you do it with a GTA or Red Dead every publisher will follow. If we have an exclusively female lead game hit 50 million copies worldwide from Rockstar, that alone wiill shatter any myth that Publishers cling on to.
I remember reading this article that covered the penny arcade report on video game female protagonists many years ago and feeling sad
https://www.themarysue.com/why-game...ont-sell-and-what-it-says-about-the-industry/
Without too many data points the sales potential of female protagonists was dismissed by most publishers.
The day Rockstar makes an exclusively female lead GTA game, it will be the true watershed moment. Until then more please!
https://www.polygon.com/2019/2/28/18244721/horizon-zero-dawn-sales-ps4
Fantastic that GG rightfully decided to go with a female protagonist. Now no more excuses for more Publishers to push for more female leads in games and not just in multiplayer but also single player games.
Come on Rockstar, do the right thing here. If you do it with a GTA or Red Dead every publisher will follow. If we have an exclusively female lead game hit 50 million copies worldwide from Rockstar, that alone wiill shatter any myth that Publishers cling on to.
I remember reading this article that covered the penny arcade report on video game female protagonists many years ago and feeling sad
https://www.themarysue.com/why-game...ont-sell-and-what-it-says-about-the-industry/
In terms of pure sales numbers, in the first three months of availability, games with only a male hero sold around 25 percent better than games with an optional female hero. Games with exclusively male heroes sold around 75 percent better than games with only female heroes.
By looking at these trends two things become clear: games that give you a choice of gender are, on average, reviewed slightly better than games with male-only heroes, but the games that sell very well are almost all led by male heroes. If you're funding a large-budget game and you see these numbers, you see that you lose sales by adding the capability to choose a female hero, and you lose significant sales by releasing a game with a female hero.
Zatkin found that female-led games received roughly 40 percent of the marketing budget as male-led games. And the reason for that, as I'm sure you've already guessed, is a story we all know by heart.
There is a sense in the industry that games with female heroes won't sell. "I think that there is general feeling from marketing that it's hard to sell a mass-market game that's a female-only protagonist," Zatkin agreed. "This may be changing greatly with mobile and social, where you're expanding the audience, but in core console land, there's a lot of marketing thought that it's hard to sell a game with a female-only protagonist in a core genre. The question is, is this something that really doesn't happen, or do marketing budgets get gimped?"
Without too many data points the sales potential of female protagonists was dismissed by most publishers.
The day Rockstar makes an exclusively female lead GTA game, it will be the true watershed moment. Until then more please!
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