I've seen this post about every year on about 50 different forums,
I'm sorry that this bothers you so much. Personally I don't know many women that play console video games.
The plural of anecdote is not data. I'd say about half my friend are women and they almost all play games. One of them has a Nintendo tattoo on her arm. Another literally named her kid after a Final Fantasy character. Dudefriends are about the same rate. So what? Shit, I haven't really touched any video game for the past month and a half, another one of my women friends just finished her marathon re-run of FF8 and is starting her FF9 run tomorrow, and before that she re-ran OoT on her N64.
So I don't really understand the perspective. All of the women I know spend time playing games on their phones and their tablets.
The vast majority of both genders are playing on mobile. Not only are mobile/phone games real games, mobile itself is the largest market between Mobile, PC, and Console. You may have noticed that everyone has a smartphone now. They are the largest hardware install base in the billions. That's with a B. I don't think a single console has managed to get even close to half of that. The idea that "this type of game" is not a real game has always been offered up as a way to try exclude women as gamers. Today it was mobile games. Previously it was because it was "browser games". Before that it was.. you see the point. Women are a major part of gaming, and most gamers now do not play on PC or console. It's time for male gamers to accept
gaming is popular, and everyone is participating in it, and even then it can still be improved.
I shop; a lot. I spend a great deal of time talking to other consumers and enthusiasts that are buying video games. They are pretty much all dudes.
Sounds like self-selection to me.
And when it is women, 7 out of 10 times they are buying for someone else. I had a lovely 15min conversation with a young mother just the other day that wanted to know all the ins and the outs of the Switch so she could buy one for her children.
Oh, this old chestnut. "The women that buy games are buying it for a man". Not only is it sexist, it ignores that plenty of men don't play video games but buy video games for their kids. How many kids are going to have a job to buy a game vs their parents? Think about it.
If you want to boil it down to its most simplest nature, video games are made by guys, for guys. They are the ones driving the vast majority of the revenue on console game sales.
Actually women were the primary programmers and involved in the earliest games. Then the arbitrary genderization of computer science in the mid 80s started an effort to push them out and exclude them. This was amplified by PCs and game consoles no longer being in the appliance section, because to be in the toy aisle back then you had to be a girls toy or a boys toy, and Nintendo chose the boys' aisle. Fun fact: most stores no longer use this mechanism because it arbitrarily limits their sales. Fun fact: men used to think programming was a woman's job. Then they came back and started pushing them out once they saw the money in it, and that's not an exaggeration, this has been the story for a lot of women-dominated fields.
There are plenty of guys that like these games. Developers are supplying things that meet this demand.
"It's this way because it is" is not an honest take of the situation and only serves to reaffirm the status quo. You have to admit there were outside forces that pushed women out of games, out of computer science, and out of technology, arbitrarily. Solely based on gender. Women that weren't pushed away still have to deal with sexism and bullshit solely for deciding to re-enter the world that used to be almost all theirs. A guy recently tried to tell one of my womenfriends that a video game character was a good example of women in games, and he couldn't even spell her name right. How many times have women been told they are fake because they mispronounce a FF character's name? This dude couldn't get a 4-letter character's name right. He will never be called fake because he did that. And despite all of this, women are roughly half the game market. There have been situations where a publisher has outright known a game had a majority of female customers - the one I'm talking about had a
76% female userbase, but the publisher would only do ad buys in male-oriented campaigns because it was the 'safe' money spend because that's what they had done the last year, the year before, etc. Males get advertised to in 2017 because they got arbitrarily chosen as the gender in 19__ for computer games and it's been a sequence of "keep your job safe and your decisions safer" since then.
It's even worse as pubs/execs will not only push a female character to be changed to male in a game, they'll also often combine it with changing the character to white, so it's a double whammy if you're a minority woman - even though you're spending lots of money on game, racism and sexism push to ignore you.
I, too, am surprised there aren't more women making video games directed towards women.
You can only be surprised if you aren't aware of the reality surrounding it. Women have been arbitrarily pushed away from tech and videogames for a long time now. The preference of games has nothing innate to do with gender, but is entirely based around.. ads and marketing. Know why the industry, and games, were majority male for a long time? Because that's what the ads were sold to. They -used- women to sell games to boys and men instead of just selling to both, because they're fucking lazy and because the gift fuckbasket that is society has both latent and overt methods of sexism and hate for women. They arbitrarily limited their own sales to both genders to squeeze 100 more copies out of one.
That way you could look past many of the games that were obviously made for other audiences. I'm not sure why there aren't more women making video games. I'll admit that I don't know much about the barriers in the industry that prevent more women from making games.
Because women are arbitrarily, with no reason, pushed away from tech. From games. From anything 'creative', because 'women don't do that'. Women are harassed for being good at math, for being in creative fields, for anything that men feel is a threat to their own job. A woman applying for a job, in the male society's mind, is taking a job away from another man. If you lose a job to another man, then you just weren't man enough to beat the other man. If a woman takes your job, she slept with someone or is 'trying to show off' or 50 other reasons obtuse fucks will give or whatever. There is literally nothing at all , innate to gender, that makes one prefer or disprefer working in games or tech. Computers and programming used to be a 90%+ female. The word 'computer' was a term first used to describe
a woman, not an IBM desktop.
There's also another thing: women in games and tech will often let people assume they are a man to just avert harassment. I will repeat this verified post from The Other Place from a developer:
So say you're a woman. You managed to get past society's gauntlets, proving grounds, methods, harassment vocally, physically, sexually, and you finally want to make a game. Oh great, now you have a group of insecure men online that will find you, stalk you, harass you, solely because you're a woman in video games 'changing' gaming from male oriented to general-consumer oriented, and they can no longer fit their hobby in their back pocket so
ATTACK! because they're changing your vidjagames and now you have to actually treat other women as fellow people in the field.
But everywhere I go, everywhere I shop, everywhere I have conversations online, it's mostly dudes.
Women will often let people assume they are a man online just to avoid harassment. Same reason a lot of women will not chat in public game chat with their voice. Because it's instant harassment if you try to talk. And before we get "well dudes, when i'm hangin' with mah lady, i don't see all this harassment and whatnot" comment from anyone, this is because men and boys will specifically wait until a woman is alone and a dude is not around to harass them.
If there were more women buying console video games I'm sure that you'd see more console games for women. It's kind of a catch22.
It's a slow change but it's coming. See above for even more reasons: even when women show up to buy, publishers will stay male oriented because it's the old reliable faucet to drink from. Hell, it's been done to age groups, even on male oriented platforms. For example, Nintendo and publishers knew the GameCube had a majority of owners 21 or older. But they released their M games on Xbox and kid games on GameCube because those were the safe, sure "nobody has ever lost their job releasing kid games on Nintendo" decision, and Xbox was the "safe" Mature platform, even though tons of kids owned Xboxes. A lot of life and the industry in general, despite how many do not want to accept it, is literally the way it is because an executive decided it is. It has nothing innate to do with gender, often ignores actual facts, and has the bonus factor of actual groups of people out there that have forced women developers from their own homes.
A guy even tried to go to a woman's house that was making games. He crashed his motorcycle on the way there. She hasn't had a permanent address for the past years. As a dude, it is extremely unlikely to have this happen to you, even if you overtly speak out against these groups. They go after the women, specifically. I don't really blame women that decided to go do something else, and the percentile that do are putting their entire life in the blender just to make a fucking toy for your ass. Have some goddamn respect for women and actually read up on history, read up on misogyny-as-law and society in general. Read up on the massively sexist ads that changed from 'family computers' to ads that said the computer belonged in a boy's room so his sister would not use it. The current situation in videogames did not occur naturally nor is it "just fine".
So don't be surprised that women aren't being prudes and prairie humble when they complain about overly sexualised women in games. Because it gets fucking tiring when you only have two selections on the menu while everyone else gets 6000 of them. But if you're like "hey could i have one of your menu options?" the other side goes "BUT I'LL ONLY HAVE 5999 THEN?!?! HOW DOES THAT WORK!?!?!"
And then you're like "But you didn't even lose that option. I just want to -"
"SAMSUNG CHIP"
"what"
"CENSUS SHIP"
"wat"
"CENSORSHIP"
"the fuck are you smoking?"
"CHANGING A GAME IS CENSHORSHAPES"
"But doesn't a game designer of a work have ultimate creative contr-"
"NOPE THEY LITERALLY HAVE TO STICK FOREVER WITH THEIR INITIAL DECISION"
"Aren't you forcing their speech then? Is that not forced speech?
"I JUST QUOTE WHAT I HEAR. ITS STILL SALSADIPS"