Why Marketers Fear The Female Geek

[Ohio Joe]

So, there is this story making the rounds where Paul Dini on a podcast explains why execs do not want female viewers for their super hero shows. There’s a link in the resources below. But the gist of it is basically “Girls do not buy our merchandise.” Sounds horrible right? People are shocked! Yeah, well, it’s worse then you think.

Here is the reasoning, that drive execs and marketers to pro-actively exclude women from their audiences and to pro-actively encourage a culture in which women do not feel welcome.

This is why we can’t have nice things… or can we?

http://howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/2013/12/marketers-fear-female-geek-2/

Perhaps not strictly Gaming but an excellent read... Some really good comments as well.

[Chan790]

1. What's interesting is that because of this...

the games-sales market is actually half (or-less. Really, there's a distinct possible-reality where the under-served market mirrors virtually every other media market (but explicitly film, books, TV) where women significantly outpace men as consumers of narrative and fiction.) of what some market trends suggest it should be because they only engage half (or less) the audience they could.

There's a huge niche opening for game design and game publishing to appeal to that other half-audience which is going completely unfulfilled.

Ask yourself, why does the explicit portion of women that make up the dominant share of the book-buying market make up a negligible share of the gaming market? (That is, why do the very-same women that buy/read fiction not generally buy/play video-games as a form of interactive fiction? It's like a 90/10% split; 90% of women who buy/read non-genre fiction do not play games.) It's certainly not because women are less savvy then men and we know factually they're much larger consumers of narrative-media product. It's because nobody is producing product for them.

[flying rabbit]

2. Uh oh... here come the gender wars to the gaming group.

You raise a good point, though. I would be surprised if the industry hasn't focused grouped this to death, and wonder what they came up with. Marketing aside, what kinds of games do appeal to female gamers and why. Anyone with no Y chromosomes want to weigh in?

[Locut0s]

3. Good read thanks for posting. I agree...

I completely agree with the article. And the idea that women aren't gamers by nature is patently false. Just do a little digging on YouTube to find the growing population of female lets players, or those who blog/vlog on games and the industry. I'm subscribed to a number of them currently, many of them have pretty large gaming collections and are very passionate about gaming.

This is yet another reason to love the Indy game boom we are in right now. Indy games don't have millions of dollars in advertising behind them. They don't by and large set out to hit some target demographic or sell X number of copies to recoup the millions invested. They are made for the love of he game from the outset. This is why you see so much innovation, variety and indeed artistry in he Indy gaming industry.

Things are changing. Slowly but it's occurring. And if the triple A game producers are smart they will see it. As Chan790 points out women are a HUGE untapped market.

[Egalitarian Thug]

4. First off...

And secondly, I'm pretty sure it comes down to the "It'll do", mentality.