Attracting and Selling to Women Gamers
One thing about Threshold I have always taken a lot of pride in is the fact that our population is almost an exact 50/50 split of men and women. I think this one fact has been vitally important to the strength of our community. This is incredibly common in the MMO industry, however:
“Currently, 64% of the gamers on the internet are women according to Nielsen Entertainment’s third annual Active Gamer Benchmark Study. Only 11% of the current MMO population, however, are women.”
We can postulate at the reasons (and I hope we do in the comments), but the bottom line is that MMO developers are utterly failing to attract female customers. Here are three recent articles shed a little light on the subject, and maybe get your brain churning and ready to share your own opinions:
Top Five Features Women May Enjoy in Champions Online
Appealing to Women: Top Three Improvements for Champions Online
It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the way that MMO designers portray women (with the most extreme example being AOC ) in order to appeal to their core demographic, couldn’t it?
A milder example would be the pics that accompany every post on your blog
I find that 11% number to be pretty surprising. It’s clear that there’s more men than women, but there always seems to be plenty of women around in any guild I’ve been a part of. I know plenty of women that play/have played WoW at least.
David: I’m glad you mentioned the pics. That is one of the biggest misconceptions about women – that they don’t want to see hot, scantily clad, or busy women characters. Pick up a copy of Cosmopolitan, Vogue, or even Shape. You will see very sexy, very hot women all over the place – many of them scantilty clad and heavily sexualized.
Women don’t want to see female characters depicted as total whore sluts who exist only to pleasure men (like a lot of the early quests in AoC, as you mention). But there is a huge difference between that and being hot and sexy.
And just so you know, the picture used in this post is a Champions Online character avatar designed by my wife. She likes it quite a bit. I do too.
P.S. Not every post! What about the Pikachu and Charmander picture from 2 or 3 posts before this one!
Outsider: I imagine many of those “women” were not women.
I don’t think that superheroes is really a genre that appeals so much to women. I remember reading that WoW had much higher than 11% (still less than male though) and I think fantasy is a genre with higher appeal.
But what about vampires/ dark fantasy, what about historical romance, what about other genres that may appeal more to a female playerbase? We know they are there, they are playing a lot of social casual games right now.
I think the population of women is probably way higher amongst the Free to Play MMO arena. Many of those games are socially oriented, have “cute” elements and don’t take up much time. You’re only ever going to see so many women attracted to FPS games for example…and the ones that do want to play said games I doubt are put off by chainmail bikinis.
In short I guess I don’t see the big deal…there’s a market for bloody action games with sluts around every corner waiting to be rescued…and there’s a market for more socially focused collaborative games. I think game publishers are making both types of games, it’s just a case of looking beyond subscription MMOs.
For this girlynugget at least, what Muckbeast says it’s true. It’s not about whether or not the chick is hawt! I love it when my virtual Barbies are hawt!
…it’s about whether or not the chick has power.
I’m fine with the slave-girl look as an outfit if said slave-girl outfitted hawt-chick also projects power and self-reliance. If she doesn’t (hello Evony ads! though those have gotten so over the top they’re comedy to me now), THAT is when I start to find things offensive.
Spinks: Studies vary, but WoW is actually right around that 11% figure. The highest I have read from a reputable source was 14% actually.
Also, super heroes are quite popular with women. It is a far more mainstream genre than fantasy. Just look at movies and television for example.
Serith78: You are very right that the free-to-play games seem to make an effort to appeal to a broader base. Perhaps it is because they have a financial motive and necessity to do so. Also, many women really get into collecting and showing off things (both can be very social behaviors). Cash shops work very nicely in those scenarios.
Quoth nugget: “For this girlynugget at least, what Muckbeast says it’s true. It’s not about whether or not the chick is hawt! I love it when my virtual Barbies are hawt! it’s about whether or not the chick has power.”
Thank you for adding that nugget. That has been my experience when talking to female gamers. I think I speak with some degree of experience here, since my wife is a gamer, half of my staff are women, and half of my customers are women.
“Also, super heroes are quite popular with women. It is a far more mainstream genre than fantasy. Just look at movies and television for example.”
On the other hand, look at books. (I’m not entirely convinced about TV either — there’s Heroes and …? Compare with any soap opera ever.) I will stand by classic costumed superheroes just not being big with a female audience. I mean even with films, compare Superman with Twilight or Titanic.
Smallville is going into its 10th season or something insane. Lois and Clark had multiple seasons. Both were popular with woman viewers.
Super heroes are more popular with women than sci-fi or fantasy.
But I think in general, ruling stuff out “women don’t like that genre” is relatively incorrect. The WAY people do things in the genre is sometimes, but that’s the problem.
[...] still on the superhero theme, I have a basic disagreement with Muckbeast in the comments on his post about attracting women gamers, about whether the superhero genre is more popular with women than fantasy or sci-fi. (Harry [...]
What’s interesting about the women and superheroes argument is that del rey just released X-Men Misfits, a manga shoujo take on the X-men. From the amazon listing it seems to be doing not bad, considering that it would make any male x-men fan foam at the mouth with its pretty radical reimagining of the X-men. It might be a good thing to watch to see if its possible for women to enjoy superhero books or content.
As for the main argument, I’m not really sure MMOs are failing to attract women. Nielsen isn’t really all that reliable a source of info. I’d need to see more studies done, and it would be nice if more MMO companies were willing to release sub data.
More evidence that women actually like entertainment that portrays “hot women”:
Girls like ‘Girls’: Why 2/3 of ‘Next Door’s’ audience is women