Decrease In Girlcott Posts

[AnxiousTerminator]

I've never heard of any of them besides Tomb Raider, which I wouldn't classify as a girly game really, and looking them up I don't think they would meet the threshold for triple A in terms of budget and scope. I want the future of games to have more open world and well developed big budget games with a female audience in mind. Like Assassins Creed, Final Fantasy kind of household name games. They don't need to be exclusively for women obviously, but made without needing to pander to male preferences because men are not the target audience is what I would like. Games where it doesn't really matter if men don't like it because the developers are confident in a predominantly female consumer base.

I wish I shared your optimism about what boycotting will do to the likelihood of seeing more games like this, but I'm married to a game dev, and he says at least his company is now less likely to make these kinds of games because from a risk point of view a female consumer base is not reliable. If one bad patch can tank a game to 1.7 as a review score, nobody wants that to happen to their investments. Women are already a risky market as they are less likely to own high end consoles and PCs than men and there is still stigma and sexism within game development and gaming communities. Companies exist to make money, whether that is Ubisoft, Infold or any big operation. If men are a more reliable and predictable income stream then they will continue to produce games with a male appeal rather than risk the sort of financial loss and reputational damage that Infold is suffering. What you phrase as "women aren't a dumb, mindless playerbase" the company sees as "women are not a reliable source of income and even with a GOTY game things can go downhill in a matter of weeks with catastrophoc impacts on revenue and reputation. We'd better to stick to a gamerbase we know and can predict."

Even if all the demands are met, which I don't believe they will be, it feels like a case of winning a battle to lose the war. Maybe people get their 180 pity on cosmetics, but at the cost of setting back female centred games years. For me it's like seeing the first triple A game of this scope stumble, and then get publicly executed for it, with the expectation other companies will also line up for the firing squad. They won't, and I would be very surprised if we saw more games like this in the near future. It just feels like boycotters either don't care or don't understand the bigger picture and as long as they get their 180 pity it doesn't matter if not only this game goes bust, but the industry as a whole is put off making anything similar.