1507 réponses à ce sujet

[Fishy]

At least with a male for marketing they can design someone that look like a warrior and not a double 0 playboy stars wearing a sword 15 time her weight.

Next thing we need it's Angelina jolie playing professional football with the big 300 lbs guy.

Modifié par Suprez30, 28 août 2010 - 07:58 .

[tpryan01]

lv12medic,
I think the misconception the EEDAR study was attempting to prove is that those sales were based on bloated budgets not gender. So the shameful truth would be that they are attempting to coast on the coattails of Assassin's Creed II as I doubt EA will be buying DA2 a superbowl ad.

Actually Call of Duty Halo and Gears of War are classified as FPS not Action and if they are targeting FPS then we have even bigger issues

PS3 FPS by Sales- 
360 FPS by sales
PC FPS by Sales

And yes I personally believe they are sacrificing a portion of their core audience to target an audience that would most likely be dissatisfied with the gameplay.

I was bummed about the lack of PC Data too

MariSkep,
Suprez30 is just trying to derail an intelligent conversation by attempting to provoke an emotional response.

Everyone Else,

Please read the post on page 49 before replying to this one.

It contains some interesting sales figures from different genres.

Modifié par tpryan01, 28 août 2010 - 09:09 .

[lv12medic]

Heh, the first half of me was just thinking aloud I think.  There are too many classifications for video games in my humble opinion.  (Hence people arguing what the difference between an RPG, cRPG, jRPG, action RPG etc. are).

And tisk tisk on that EEDAR study.  No error?  Blargh, that just irks me.  People practicing un-safe statistics.  <_<

[tpryan01]

lv12medic wrote...

Heh, the first half of me was just thinking aloud I think.  There are too many classifications for video games in my humble opinion.  (Hence people arguing what the difference between an RPG, cRPG, jRPG, action RPG etc. are).

And tisk tisk on that EEDAR study.  No error?  Blargh, that just irks me.  People practicing un-safe statistics.  <_<

I don't understand it isn't a sample size they are using the full body of sales data so how would there be a margin of error? 

if sample size = 100% of total then error is 0

Modifié par tpryan01, 28 août 2010 - 09:17 .

[lv12medic]

tpryan01 wrote...

lv12medic wrote...

Heh, the first half of me was just thinking aloud I think.  There are too many classifications for video games in my humble opinion.  (Hence people arguing what the difference between an RPG, cRPG, jRPG, action RPG etc. are).

And tisk tisk on that EEDAR study.  No error?  Blargh, that just irks me.  People practicing un-safe statistics.  <_<

I don't understand it isn't a sample size they are using the full body of sales data so how would there be a margin of error? 

if sample size = 100% of total then error is 0

Oh, sorry, I should have specified.  I was looking at their average review scores vs. gender of the protagonist, not the percentage part of games sold in total.  So, Percision of measurment, error propagation, etc.; that sort of stuff.

Though I suppose they probably just pulled their data off of metacritic or something like it which doesn't include the error for their average review scores either...

[AtreiyaN7]

tpryan01 wrote...

Blessed Silence,

On this board that is not rare I think. Amongst us old ladies at least. I've been playing since ColecoVision and the TI-99 4A and zork... (you are truly an old schooler if you remember zork)

<---- Female gamer who remembers Zork - now I've been reminded of how old I am! DOH!

On topic: as a female, I don't give a flying fig about which gender the marketing is directed at. After years as a female gamer (see above about remembering Zork *sigh*), I expect that the marketing for any major game will be geared towards males. Because we're talking about a BioWare game, it's already a given that  they will will have a strong female lead in addition to a male lead. The company has a history of catering to female customers as well as their male customers after all.

As a general rule, I concern myself with the following things in evaluating a game: gameplay, story, role-playing aspects (if applicable) & graphics. When I watch a gameplay trailer, I'm focused on the action and graphics. I ignore the gender. It's largely unimportant to me, as I'm perfectly willing to play a game with a male lead. If it's a cinematic trailer, then its only function is be intriguing enough to make me want to look up information about the game.

I loved Batman: Arkham Asylum (big Bats/comic fan here), but that was not exactly marketed towards females. I don't see how it would even be possible to come up with a female-centric marketing campaign for that game or others like it...maybe have Batman making googly eyes at Barbara Gordon or emphasizing the Harley Quinn/Joker romance? If it were Splinter Cell, what do you think they'd do to appeal to females - emphasize Sam and his relationship with his daughter or the fact that Grimsdottir is a female? *sigh* I just want games to strictly appeal to me based on the strength of their gameplay, not because I was told that I could play as a female character.

Modifié par AtreiyaN7, 28 août 2010 - 09:30 .

[tpryan01]

I think the point is the marketing does not explain to the uninitiated what the game is. (see categorization and sales figures on page 49) And there are several studies some quoted here, that males are likely to play opposite gender but females are not.

The other major point is that Action games are action oriented with a little plot while RPGs and Bioware games especially tend to be highly customizable plot with some action. And in several mediums not just video games it has been shown that plot appeals more strongly to females while males are fine without it. again not saying I don't like mindless action every now and again or that girls don't like to fight, but I just need to know why I am doing it ;-)

Modifié par tpryan01, 28 août 2010 - 09:57 .

[AtreiyaN7]

Yes, I can see it being an issue for those without previous knowledge of the series and that the current trailer doesn't reveal anything whatsoever about gameplay or the story or how that all works. However, I think it is merely supposed to function as an ostensibly exciting teaser. I've played every BioWare RPG they've ever made, so I get the appeal of their games. *chuckle*

I'm just not sure that you can really convey the strengths of their games that do appeal to many of us (the story, the characters, the romances, making choices, etc.) in a minute or two and find a way to do it without making it completely dry. My preference is to play as a female if it's an option of course, but if not it doesn't bother me. Tthen again, I'm probably quite atypical and am also prone to wanting to blow away characters/snap their necks in games after getting bad edits from authors (kind of like that one author who inserted ten million ellipses into her edits when she was supposed to enter ONLY the complete text into the edit form).

EDIT: speaking of edits, I didn't even notice the "new" part in the thread title up there, but my eyes are somewhat fried right now.

Modifié par AtreiyaN7, 28 août 2010 - 10:27 .

[tpryan01]

 I think this is exactly what I am looking for from bioware

http://www.guildwars2.com/en/

[Saibh]

tpryan01 wrote...

 I think this is exactly what I am looking for from bioware

http://www.guildwars2.com/en/

Unfortunately, that's an MMO and not comparable with a single-player RPG with a semipredefined character.

[tpryan01]

no Iol I meant the style of commersial, not the game itself

[Sirsmirkalot]

tpryan01 don't trust that site blindly though, I know they've messed up their data significantly on one or two occasions.

Modifié par Sirsmirkalot, 29 août 2010 - 06:50 .

[tpryan01]

possibly but I still think my conclusions on bioware's marketing reasoning are sound

[Myxyplyxxx]

tpryan01 wrote...

So the new question for ladies only:

How did you find out you could play as a girl in DA:O, ME or ME2?

I found out that I could play a female character first when I started playing, and I found out about the game first when my husband told me "I think you would like this game." This is how I got introduced to both DA and ME. Otherwise I don't know if I would even have heard of them, almost certainly not. That's why I think that a marketing campaign directed at female customers should maybe use other channels of information, and should also emphasize the game's story and characters, and the fact that it's more than just meaningless killing. The last part is a personal preference, because I don't like pure action games.
As for the matter of advertising the possibility to play a female character, well in my case that was not my first concern. I never played a female Shepard, but I still enjoyed ME a lot, while in DA I didn't (yet) play through with a male character, as I enjoyed too much the female character. I guess it depends on the story, but the fact that both female and male characters are a possibility is important.

[KhorinShizucor]

To answer the question posed by tpryan01, I got introduced to DA:O by my husband. He said to me, "You'd like this game". Now, I haven't played many RPG games but most have allowed me to choose the gender so I assumed I could play a female. However, I don't have a problem if my character's gender is set and unchangeable.

With ME, I saw my husband playing a female character.

On another note, my husband is always the one giving me game recommendations. He never disappoints. I don't play games that often so I don't go out and seek upcoming games. DA:O made a huge impression on me so I started following the franchise.

Modifié par KhorinShizucor, 31 août 2010 - 12:16 .

[tpryan01]

At the risk of being called sexist by certain people do you think advertising emphasizing story and romance over action would have made you more likely to pick up DA:O or either ME before a your husband introduced it to you?

[wwwwowwww]

come on already

[SirGladiator]

It does depend on your history, just what your expectations are. Some might be used to games that let you pick your gender, while others are more used to games that don't. If you don't have a clue either way, and you know nothing about the game other than what you've seen in magazines or on websites other than this one, there's a real good chance you think that you can't even play a female character in DA2. That's pretty much the key problem, the unbelievably bad marketing. It isn't hard to show a picture of your female character, the fact that it's some kind of mystery while they show tons of pictures of the male character WAY beyond anything necessary to let the players know that you can play as a male character in the game, only serves to send the message that you can 'only' play as a male character in the game.



It's harder to put yourself in the shoes of an uninformed person when you are informed yourself, but if you can imagine yourself being totally clueless about DA2, and you'd never seen this website and had no idea it existed, all you'd seen was the big demo, or one of the many articles talking about Hawke and 'his' new adventures, at what point would you get the idea that it was even possible to play as a female character? You wouldn't. So the folks who only like to play as male characters will be plenty happy, as they should be, but those who don't will very much not be.



It doesn't exactly take much effort to let people know that they can play as a male or female character. The occasional article that features Lady Hawke and her picture, a Demo featuring Lady Hawke (either on her own or with male Hawke as well), it's not exactly rocket sceince, although it might as well be to the marketing folks at Bioware, because its obviously way over their heads. Given that being able to play as a male character or a female character is a HUGE selling point for the game, the fact that the marketing team never actually 'sells' that selling point is really nothing short of incompetence, there's really no way to sugar-coat that.



The bottom line is this; we can play as a male character, we get that. We've seen the demo, we've seen tons of pictures, anybody who has ever heard of DA2 at all gets that. What they don't get is that you can also play as Lady Hawke, and lots of people, men and women, would rather play as a female character than a male character, so it would be to their advantage to show off the fact that in DA2 you can indeed do that. All that is completely aside from the fact that female lead characters actually tend to be better for a game than male lead characters (just the other day I saw a commercial for the newest Metroid game, which featured quite prominently the fact that the lead character was a woman, even though of course they don't have to do that, since most of the game she's in a suit where you can't tell that she's even a woman. So if having a female lead character was anything but an advantage, they would've just shown her in the suit the whole time, but they showed her out of the suit most of the commercial only because it is a huge plus, not a minus, that she is a woman). So hopefully somebody will remedy this oversight, and they'll do a better job of promoting Lady Hawke in the future.

[wowpwnslol]

The game should introduce "cooking" and "tailoring" skills. If your character is a female you should get huge bonuses to those 2 skills.

[Myxyplyxxx]

tpryan01 wrote...

At the risk of being called sexist by certain people do you think advertising emphasizing story and romance over action would have made you more likely to pick up DA:O or either ME before a your husband introduced it to you?

I can only speak for myself, but the answer is yes. My first reaction when I hear about a new game is: "what is it about?" 

[upsettingshorts]

Considering pretty much all consumable media of this group - games, TV, and movies - have advertising targeted at 18-35 males, the demographic that by far consumes the most of it - I think any attraction of new female gamers will be incidental.

[Myxyplyxxx]

wowpwnslol wrote...

The game should introduce "cooking" and "tailoring" skills. If your character is a female you should get huge bonuses to those 2 skills.

Your patronizing is not appreciated. For my part, I did not become a fan of The Sims, and I think you missed or did not care to get the point.

[upsettingshorts]

I'm a dude, and learning how to cook is awesome and absolutely worth it.



And yes, that includes baking. Man up and put those cookies in the oven, bro. You will be rewarded.

[Anarya]

Yeah don't underestimate cooking or tailoring in games OR real life. That's some useful and potentially profitable shiz, yo.