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[Brass_Buckles]

Exactly what the title says.

 

I know that marketing's going to hound the developers to not show the women, because they assume males are their primary market.  But these forums alone contain oodles of women, and since forum posters are a minority I'd expect there are a whole lot more out there who don't post--and a few who are on the forums but don't admit to being female.  Not to mention I'm sure there are guys who'd prefer to play the female Inquisitor.  I don't think using her in marketing is going to hurt your sales.

 

I can't speak for the rest of us women, but I'd like to see a few renders of female inquisitors.  So far I've only seen some concept art, which is great and better than it was with Mass Effect where we got nothing until ME3, but we've heard the male inquisitor voice, we've seen renders of male inquisitors...

 

I'm starting to feel like my Inquisitor is invisible as anything more than concept art--because even though I play males every now and then, my character will be a woman at least nine times out of ten.

 

So how about it, Bioware?  Could we have a screenshot of the female Inquisitor in action?  Could the next trailer show a lady Inquisitor?  Pretty please?

 

 

MODEDIT: Just an addendum to this post, the conversation has evolved a lot form this point and in large part discusses female protagonists in games in a variety of topics.  If you are just now seeing this thread, it may be most worthwhile to see where the discussion is currently at at the end of the thread.

Thank you.

[Allan Schumacher]

I don't know how large BioWare's DA:I team is, but I wonder why they couldn't work on the female Inquisitor at the same time that they were working on the male Inquisitor that was featured in the trailer. You know, to have them done around the same time.
 
Does the female Inquisitor require more planning in regards to her appearance? If so, why?

 
 
It's more, for better or worse, because one gets chosen.  IIRC, we actually discussed this a bit when there was some concept art that showed off a variety of armor sets, and you created a thread asking why they were all of men and not women.  You suggested that we should have done some that were men, and some that are women, and I was trying to explain that for the purposes of iterating quickly on armor means that the body type that it rests on is more of a mannequin.
 
If you are to say that we don't need to start by doing a man Inquisitor first, I agree.  But a large part of the issue is simply "The male Inquisitor was started first."  Which isn't fair, nor do I really expect to placate anyone by saying this (I would, however, not be surprised if I end up slighting someone... yet I still click Post because I'm silly....).  And I mean started first even on a concept art level.  Combine this with doing vertical slices to see how far you can go with the tools and the engine (which is literally to dive deep down and focus on a selection of assets), and one gets developed.  And unfortunately, splitting the time to work on both evenly CAN incur a cost, because then we're giving internal demos on vertical slices where we didn't focus as much on pushing fidelity and we actually don't know the limits of the engine, haven't established our visual targets, and possibly even deliver lesser quality demonstration which may actually negatively affect the ability to get funding, or extend the game by a year, and whatnot.
 
Wanting us to make the female first is fair and I'd like for us to give that a try too.  Wanting us to make both to the same degree of fidelity while in tandem, however, is something that I am skeptical will happen.  I can think of several potential internal risks for doing that, for benefits that maybe I'm not fully realizing.  I can understand the marketing benefit (which has been stated here).  There may be other benefits to it, such as making sure one doesn't receive more time than the other, and other things like that.  There could be more too.
 
 
Although, as to your question "Does the female Inquisitor require more planning in regards to her appearance? If so, why?" it did remind me of this article I read just earlier today, about Desktop Dungeons character art:
http://www.themarysu...ale-characters/
 
It could be that doing art for women characters is more time consuming because it involves breaking down a lot of the easy fallbacks that a lot of (principally male) artists utilize.  For example, the artists found that "Shorthands for the feminine kept crawling into our work when we weren’t paying attention – smooth skin, homogenized facial structures, evidence of makeup, you name it."
 
So part of the efficiency problem comes, in the short term, from acknowledging that how women are depicted in games is a problem.  I mean, if BioWare were to put out a trailer with a woman Inquisitor that had Aribeth's plate mail on it, I don't think we'd actually be doing much for making sure that people that want to see more women in marketing content get what they want.
 
 
I understand this sounds like excuses, and I suppose it is and like I said I'm expecting that some people won't be too thrilled at this answer (in part, I think, because I am not very experienced on trying to discuss the issue and will probably make mistakes).  But I mean, it's also no surprise that the first character kits that were made available for costume design and so forth were the same party members that we showed off in the PAX demonstration.  Those ones got the most time early, and are the farthest along as a result.  That's the way it is with the male Inquisitor too, as unfortunate as that may be for people that would like to see more marketing for a female Inquisitor.  You could probably make a decent guess as to which party member will receive a character kit costume package too, based on what you've seen so far.

[Allan Schumacher]

I don't think it sounds like excuses. It's a way things are right now, and this is a big ship to turn around. Your insider perspective is definitely appreciated.

 

I agree that the ship is big.  Slightly related, in case anyone hadn't already seen this.  A piece from one of DAI's concept artists for Cassandra, and about how he recognizes that women are a big part of DA fandom and how we need to consider them more than we have in the past.

http://theworkofcasp...eauty_2687.html

 

It's off topic for the thread, specifically, but threads like these serve as the "oh right" types of stuff so that it stays in the mind.  Cheers!

[Allan Schumacher]

I appreciate Allan Schumacher's weighing in on the issues.  I still think it would be ideal if both male and female assets could be developed at the same time, but I appreciate that apparently females for whatever reason take longer to develop.  Asking for women to come first is maybe another issue entirely.  I just don't like that we're treated as an afterthought.  It even happened with the female turians.  All I want is to see some marketing thrown at the lady gamers out there who might be more inclined to buy if they know they can be badasses too.

 

Just to clarify, my supposition is merely a deduction from that link where the developers said they found it a constant challenge to keep a lot of their historic tropes for creating women characters in check.  In this sense, it may be slower, simply because there's the challenge of smashing down those inappropriate preconceptions.  But I'd consider it a temporary thing.  But I'm also applying the experiences those artists had with ours, which may not be fair.

 

With respect to choosing to focus on the women assets first, it's just part of the (slow...) process I think.  I think it will happen eventually... but I'm not privy to the types of challenges that may come up by suggesting we (or any other studio) do so.  I went to my first ever PAX this year, though, and it's painfully clear how appealing our games seem to be for women given the large amount of women that came to talk.  I didn't really take polls on the distribution, but in terms of the people that were interested in talking games with me was probably about 90% women.

[Allan Schumacher]

Do you think there's a disconnect between anecdotes like these and the way the game is marketed? From the DA2 campaign you'd swear the marketing department were pitching at an audience of 12 year old boys, with the rock music trailers and "fighting like a Spartan" etc. I know that it's a minefield to start stereotyping groups of fans, but (again, anecdotally) it seems that many of the players most invested in the characters and roleplaying aspects of the games are women. Certainly from my own experiences at Bioware events (I was at PAX Australia) there were a huge number of incredibly fun, enthusiastic female players. 

 

Although it's marketing's job to get the game out to as wide and as mainstream an audience as possible, couldn't the bombastic (and occasionally unpleasantly macho) ad campaigns actually turn away fans who are more interested in exploration, story or characters? 

 

It's hard to say specifically how much an event like PAX reflects its audience.  There could be factors at play that I'm not aware of.  There some biases in terms of the ability and desire to attend PAX.  It's possible that a lot of people who don't really swing by are still fans.  Maybe our games have a particular appeal to women gamers compared to other games that some women attended exclusively because of BioWare's presence (some people basically hung out the whole weekend, which was pretty cool and ultra flattering).

 

I think our ad campaign will be a bit less bombastic this time, but at the same time DAO is BioWare's best selling game I believe.  Did marketing help that?  I'm pretty clueless to say, to be honest.  Perhaps those that are interested in exploration, story, and characters are likely already going to get our game?  Maybe there are some that don't realize that they love story and characters in games?  Marketing strikes me as a lot of art (rather than science) because ultimately you don't really get to repeat your study and there's so many potential confounding variables IMO.

 

 

The PAX audience tells me, though, that there's a non-trivial amount of women gamers that love our game, and possibly the biggest most die hard fans are more likely women (which would be cool, if true).  But yeah, it's just an anecdote so some assumptions may be wrong.

[Allan Schumacher]

Sad truth is that a lot of marketing companies everyone (video games and movies included) have this thing where they think that female led movies/games are going to fail so they don't want to advertise them. But guess what? Then they fail because people don't know the media existed. Equal marketing for something male or female led shouldn't be a difficult thing to ask for because ONLY THEN can you truly tell if a game or movie failed because of X because unless all things are on an equal standing you are going to get biased results.

 

"Oh, you mean this male led movie we gave a crap budget and never advertised failed? Must be because it was a crap movie."

 

"Oh, you mean this female led movie we gave a crap budget and never advertised failed? Must be because movie goers hate boobs and vajayjays. Couldn't possibly be that we set it up to fail from the beginning through our misguided budget choices."

 

I agree that there's a big chicken and egg problem, with data that likely isn't fair fueling perspectives.

 

 

 

 

I'm sure they're out there, but I don't know of a single male gamer who doesn't have at least one playthrough with a female character.

 

It's actually very rare for me to play a woman in a game if I am given the option.  Something that I can't even really understand.  On some level characters that I play tend to be in some ways a self-insert, and I think it's because mentally I often trip up on "am I playing this character appropriately, or am I simply ascribing my assumptions to what Allan thinks is appropriate despite lacking any sort of genuine perspective?"

The odd thing is that I have no real issues playing as a woman if it's required.  Whether that be through a fixed character (like Lara Croft), or because a particular class is tied to a man/woman (i.e. the Sorceress in Diablo II was the mage/wizard type of character).

 

 

But then, I remember talking with some women on Obsidian's boards that weren't keen on playing Alpha Protocol because the only option was to play as a man, so people like me definitely exist on both sides and I can't really say how common it is for one or the other, relative to each other.

[Allan Schumacher]

I mean, I assume that people who go to conventions (or comment on the forums) are going to be quite a small minority of the game's ~4-5 million players, and an even smaller minority of all of the people who could theoretically want to buy a Dragon Age game. We can't really assume that knowing that (anecdotally) most of the hardcore fans are female would actually change the marketing team's minds, if they have data that shows "male players in the 18-25 demographic" are the most lucrative market this year, or whatever. From a business point of view, those players are more or less as valuable a customer as the most invested fans in the franchise,

 

It is interesting that the majority of the people that play the game likely won't even finish it.  It could probably be presented as a viable argument that the depth of the games is wholly subsidized by people that enjoy the game well enough, but probably don't finish it.  That is, if only the hardcore that loved our games bought them, we'd have to dial back what we deliver with the games.

[Allan Schumacher]

Conversely though, I'm sure while a huge chunk of players don't complete games, the size of players who deliver the word of mouth advertising/sales for a game might be a very small group. Possibly/likely the most hardcore, who not only complete a game but also go back for multiple playthroughs.


So while metrics may say that many players don't see the entire story or go through a second run, it could be that the players who DO are the ones you have to impress for the game to receive the kind of fan acclaim that could translate to sales. I don't have any numbers to back such ideas, but I'd be curious to see if they could be analyzed.

 

Sure it could be.  I agree that the hardcore can help (assuming they love the game of course) and that it's useful.  It also could not help.  I don't know.

 

But it's hard to say how much they help.  Which is why I refer to marketing more as art rather than a science.  I have no definitive way to measure the level of influence, even if it is logically consistent, because reality often doesn't flow from logical deductions.  The only real way to measure this would probably be far too expensive.

 

Additional questions are along the lines

 

1) even if a person doesn't finish the game, does he or she still enjoy it enough to spread it via word of mouth?

2) Could any of these groups have a negative effect on sales?  If so, why and under what circumstances?  Are all these circumstances equal?

3) Are there particular game features that make word of mouth more/less effective?  Does a particular audience care more (or less) for a particular feature?

 

 

Which is why it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem, IMO.  It's not really something you can create and replicate in an experiment to try to control the variables.  You'll get a game that does well, and it's "see, feature/marketing X worked (or didn't hurt)."  But without an alternate universe to run as a test case, it's hard to say.  And you'll get people that, rightly or wrongly, will go "This game didn't sell as well, and it has a feature in it that was considered potentially risky... I guess that feature was the problem after all!"

[Allan Schumacher]

^

There are many who feel the production costs of games have gone up without underlying content or systems increasing/improving, though. A voiced characters results in a fraction of the total lines, fancier combat animations results in combat mechanics made with action elements in mind instead of strategy, etc. Venues like Kickstarter show that the most hardcore fans can fund a game they value without the extra production value (but the same level of content) as AAA games.

 

Oh yes, I'm sure that there are some people that would love that.  I'm sure that there are some people that would be very disappointed by it too.

 

The jury is still somewhat out for Kickstarter IMO.  The higher profile games, like Broken Age, Wasteland 2, and Project Eternity, still have to come to pass.  I regularly follow Project Eternity (and to a lesser extent Wasteland 2) and there are those that are upset because features are (or are not in) that they assumed would be.  There was a large Fallout-Wasteland split for Wasteland 2 and Pillars of Eternity will not have any romances, for example, and both created reasonably "loud" threads with a hefty amount of arguing.

 

The Eternity one is interesting, IMO, because "everyone agreed" that games should go back to the isometric style like the Infinity Engine games, but once that was established the aspects that were considered vital in order to be a game that represented an Infinity Engine game were hotly debated.

[Allan Schumacher]

After writing that, I do think it's important to point out that "hardcore" need not mean "old school" either.  I know some hardcore BioWare fans that were introduced to the studio because of Dragon Age 2.

[Allan Schumacher]

Well, I think extolling or criticizing the virtues of Kickstarter isn't really here nor there for this particular conversation. I was simply using it as a reference that production value isn't a required aspect of games. So what those "casual" gamers are subsidizing isn't neccessarily benefiting the game design/development of games the "hardcore" want. At least not neccessarily.

 

Fair point.  Though I think it's still an interesting side note when looking at a fanbase and trying to reconcile marketing perspectives.  And yeah, I just wanted to call out the "hardcore" distinction.

 

I think humans have a problem with assuming that because they fit in a group, all members of that group are innately unified in almost every capacity (I do the same).

[Allan Schumacher]

At the risk of stepping into a crossfire:

 

 

 

You've come into a thread where we're asking politely that women be more included in marketing and trying to offer constructive means to do so, and you have basically said, "haha no sorry because dudebro is already there, sorry ladies but we only need one lead and it's a dude and he's white--there's no room for anyone else."  Yes, I'm going to be indignant about that.

Now granted, I have some previous interactions aside from this thread, but Fast Jimmy isn't saying "we only need one lead and it's a dude and he's white."  He's saying he'd rather not see any sort of protagonist at all.  He's spoken out about this in the past, and prefers DAO's boxart because it doesn't show any sort of protagonist, while DA2's does show a protagonist and he considers that a failing of the boxart because it may lead people to think that that character specifically is the one you're going to play (my counter to this is that this is a risk of showing any character on the cover).

 

 

That said, with respect to Fast Jimmy, when you said the following:

 

 

Sorry - I can't endorse encouraging a company to do something that's wrong, even if they have the option of doing it wrong in a way that will make others feel better. It's still a wrong, bad idea.

 

Within the context of this thread, you've basically stated "you are all wrong.  That's not the right way to do it."  This is always going to make someone asking for something defensive (it made me twitch too), and to be honest I don't think we're really equipped to straight up state "it's wrong" because we can't really do an experiment and we can't really quantify if the type of protagonist-less boxart/marketing you would like would even make any difference.  If we do it, and the game sells poorly... is it because the marketing was bad, or was the game lacking?  If we do it, and the game sells great, is it because of the marketing or is it because of the game's quality being good.  Too many confounding variables.  It's part of the frustration that women share in that when a game with more women in the marketing does poorly, people can conclude that it's because of the marketing, not the game, and that's frustrating.

 

 

I do feel (and I think people agree) that there's a divide here, in that what Jimmy feels is best for the game's marketing is not what many of the women here feel is best of the game's marketing.  And those perspectives, as far as I'm concerned, are perfectly fine to hold given the difficulty of discerning the quantifiable effect a marketing detail like that may make given all the things that eventually get shown.  In that sense, I don't think anyone can be called "wrong" though I do agree that given the nature of this particular thread, coming in and suggesting that one group IS (matter of factly) wrong for wanting what they want is going to come across the wrong way.

 

 

In any case, yes I agree that if posters are getting your blood boiling, take a break and disengage.  I appreciate that rather than escalating things.  I do think that there's a degree of misunderstanding that happened, and hope that further discussion can be somewhat reset back to a more cordial perspective.  I hope my interpretations of people's perspectives are both correct, and clearly communicated for everyone so that people don't hold any unnecessary grudges.

 

 

In any case I played too much Titanfall and have to go to bed now....  If anyone has any questions about this post please fire off a PM to me.

 

Good night.

[Allan Schumacher]

I can see pros and cons of showing an iconic protagonist.  An advantage of Hawke is that someone can have that outfit on, with the blood smear, and people will recognize "Oh that's Hawke."  It's not that the details of the face necessarily even need to be precise.  Put on that armor with the smear, and people will recognize it.  It's a type of branding that could be important.

 

Even if it crosses gender/sex, I think someone like Holly Conrad (or a plethora of other women!) can dress up in the N7 armor and people will go "Yeah that's Commander Shepard."  She certainly doesn't look like man Shepard, or even that much like default woman Shepard.  In that sense, I think marketing did something right, even if the iconic character had a particular look.

 

 

For something like Dragon Age: Inquisition, maybe it'd be better to have that iconic look be a bit more generalized (since it's more than just human), but I'm not sure that the mere existence of an "iconic look" is bad if it can result in people identifying a particular outfit as being "the armor of Dragon Age Inquisition's main character."  I'm not sure how much a box art specifically needs to explain what the game content is really like, or rather more catch an eye.  In this case, as the women in this thread have pointed out, by having a woman on the boxart (or in marketing in general) could be useful in catching the eye of someone who values that.  From there, they have picked up the box/clicked on the link/whatever, and from there supplementary content (in the article, on the back, etc.) can explain what the game is.  Some may go "oooo" and some may go "naaah" but that initial hook, to me, is pretty important for a lot of potential customers.

 

 

I do think that there is a risk of a cover being potentially TOO busy (I'm a big fan of the Dragon Age covers because I find them very clean, and eye catching -- which may be a personal bias), as well as too sparse.  I think it's also important to have a degree of consistency in the style, so that different marketing attempts don't conflict with each other in terms of making an association in a person's mind.

 

In this sense (note: I'm not a marketer, and I'm just thinking on the fly), for any individual piece of material, whether it be a box art, poster, or even trailer, I'd probably go with a randomized selection of a race gender, but all wearing the same armor set.  With this, you could still show off physical differences between races/sex with each promo piece, while maintaining an aesthetic consistency between all of them so that the association of "that's the Inquisitor" can be reinforced.  Then for the box art, any reference to the protagonist would be made simply to the armor (possibly with no one inside it -- literally just have the armor placed somewhere) used in other materials, with any actually fleshed out characters being party members.  And I'd probably still keep the Blood Dragon since I think that that is a pretty iconic look for the franchise itself.

 

Anyways, my musings before I head off to volleyball.

[Allan Schumacher]

I really believe that marketing companies are more afraid of turning away men with a female protagonist on box art then men are afraid of buying a game with a female protagonist on the box. (It's early. I hope that made sense.) I don't know of any men, even in this thread, who would turn away from a game because of a woman on the cover. Maybe I've missed it or I'm a little too wide-eyed, but I think it's a marketing dilemma that's created in the minds of the people who are marketing the game, and not the people who are buying the game.

 

It's also made more complicated if these leanings/decisions are made more subconsciously than consciously.  I think it's less "person looks at cover, scoffs at the woman the cover, then moves on" and is more "whatever subconscious things are going on in my mind while inundated with imagery causes my attention to gravitate towards one thing over another."  Which is a bit harder to nail down with anecdotal self-analysis.

 

As an example, it's only recently that I feel I could say I reasonably understand why someone may appreciate better representation with characters and protagonists.  I remember being utterly baffled by a woman mentioning that she wasn't interested in Alpha Protocol because you could only play as a male character.  That was strange to me because I certainly didn't have any problems playing as a woman in some games!  But our experiences were different.  I certainly wouldn't have stated at the time that I was afraid of women protagonists, or that my attitudes my have reflected various -isms or a general inability to understand why it may be an issue.

 

It was more that it was something I just didn't think much about, for a variety of reasons.  Some of which are probably hard to isolate because it was more that I wasn't consciously thinking about it, but for some reason certain things would catch my attention.

[Allan Schumacher]

That's true... but, then again, I've found as a straight white male I've found the world has a lot of issues with ME, by default.

 

This can probably be applied most (all) groups I think, though, within some contexts.  It's hard for me to get too frustrated when this happens to me when I realize "There are people that have found that the world has a lot of issues with them, by default."  If anything it probably adds a degree of perspective in that "Oh... THIS is how it feels to be judged and hated simply based on some trait I have through no real fault of my own...."

 

 

I see it as a symptom and hope that things will get better as progress is made and to try my best not to "keep any cycles" going.  (I'm not always successful)

[Allan Schumacher]

Link doesn't work for me

[Allan Schumacher]

Now, Allan told us it was because her stuff wasn't finalized, but frankly, neither is any of the male Inquisitor armor and appearances we did see.

 

I actually stated that it was because we had to choose one to start with.  And unfortunately it probably wasn't a conscious choice either, but rather the ones that come because of habits/assumption/convenience/whatever....  Which is problematic, but I do try to choose my words carefully and feel I have to clarify lest people assume that I did say things in that way.  Not showing the female Inquisitor at this point is not because she's not finalized, but because she's not done enough.

 

Yes the Inquisitor we have shown is "not finalized" but that's a nebulous term because anything from "not-existing at all" to the instant before "done" technically fits into that bucket.

We showed glimpses of Morrigan and Cassandra at the E3 trailer as well, despite not being final (changes have happened since then).  I don't know if anything we've shown fits into the bucket of being completely final.

 

 

Unfortunately, I don't believe fans and the media are that understanding of showing off a clearly unfinished asset.  Imagine that the PAX playthrough was with a temporary body, lacking in any sort of armor (or even texture).  We're giving the same demonstration, and the exact same playthrough, but I think it'd be a big elephant in the room.  I don't think this is a guess either, because I see it with all sorts of games where people really scrutinize pre-alpha content and whatnot.  I think people would go "what the heck are you showing us?"

 

Now demos can suck because they can be a big distraction from work, if we let them be that way.  But, something like the PAX or E3 demo also lets us dive deep to see what it takes to make content that looks presentable and even playable.  Effectively a vertical slice, it takes a small chunk of the breadth of the game and then tries to push that content farther than the rest of the game.  This is useful for letting us know how efficient our tools are (since they had to be recreated, this is extra useful) so we have an idea on how accurate our time estimates are for delivering on all the content for the entire game are.  This is what I am referring to when I say "one is chosen" because splitting that focus between two protagonist models would definitely mean the protagonist doesn't look as good, which definitely means that people are going to scrutinize that aspect of the demo.

 

 

 

 

most of the fandom didn't know the art was of a woman until Matt shared it on his blog.

 

Wasn't the issue more that people didn't know it was supposed to be the Inquisitor?  I remember being in the thread where someone (Sandal) asked why that concept art blitz didn't show any women Inquisitors, and Rhodes came in and shared that there were some.

[Allan Schumacher]

Transplanting some posts from the Twitter thread.

[Allan Schumacher]

Could you provide me with a valid reason as to why BioWare should show a female over a male inquisitor in their trailers other than: ''Because.... Female!''

 

How about "Because it's almost never female?"

[Allan Schumacher]

That's as valid an argument as: ''It's almost always male''.
I don't understand this obsession with forcing artificial surface-equality down everybodies throats. Pick the gender that either makes the most sense in the context, or the one that is the easiest to work with for that particular type of advertisement content.

 

I consider the argument "it's almost always male" to be a valid argument, however.  So yes, I agree that it's just as valid....

 

 

I didn't understand the "obsession" either, but I (think) I understand it better now.  I think it's easy for us to lose perspective when the advertising caters so much to us.  The odd time the advertising doesn't cater so much to us, it's a novel thing and not a big deal for us.  I can understand with the idea that it's a problem when the advertising almost never caters to a group of people.

 

For instance, what gender makes the most sense for Dragon Age: Inquisition?  What's the context?

[Allan Schumacher]

1.  Marketing towards people who don't finish your game seems like a bad idea, they are hardly likely to be loyal customers or buy continuously if they weren't motivated enough to get through the game.

2.  But an 82% to 18% split seems to be overwhelmingly in favor of more male players.  Assuming equal rates of women played as MaleShep as men played as FemShep (which based on my experience on this forum I doubt)

3.  There is no feasible way to get word of the game and its features to everyone who could possibly be interested no matter how much ad money is spent.  If someone sees the trailer and isn't interested simply because they can't play a female character then that is their problem.  Not to say that there can't be a better job of getting out all the features of a game in a trailer, but showing of a CC in a trailer breaks the pacing or can confuse the average viewer.

 

You should market to people are more likely to buy your game.  And since the statistics available about what gender is more played indicates more people are interested in MaleShep than FemShep why on Earth would you market the game otherwise?

 

 

Just as a note, #2 is the Shepard breakdown, and that's the only thing it tells us is what gender of Shepard was completed.  It's hard for us to definitively conclude who was playing those Shepard's, even if it's a logical conclusion (note, logic often doesn't reflect reality).

 

It's also important to note that the default for the game was male.  Much like how the largest bulk of DAO's players were Male, Human Noble warriors.  It's possible that the data cited doesn't lead the conclusions that people think it might.  It's just data.  We'd need to do experiments which is trickier.

[Allan Schumacher]

If you'd like I can take a picture of my ME3 box with FemShep on the cover

 

And I firmly believe that it wouldn't have made a significant difference. 

 

Note that if it wouldn't have made a significant difference, then that means that by extension there's little reason not to do it as well.

[Allan Schumacher]

Okay, I'm about to nip this in the bud.

 

If women "only" make up 38% of the 79.4 million Xbox Ones sold (source), then that means that there are 30.1 million women Xbox gamers out there.

 

(Obviously this is an approximation since it's assuming 1 Xbox = 1 player).

 

I don't think that 38% (or even 20%) is a small number that indicates "well this market should be ignored."

 

 

 

That said, we're all (including myself) making conjecture on how much of a difference it would make.  I imagine that's where a lot of the gunshyness comes from (which sucks).  IF it DOES make a difference, and that difference is bad... well then whoa that sucks.  On some level its risk aversion I think, and I find continued threads like this help chip away at the risk.

[Allan Schumacher]

The statistics do tell us that more players are interested in playing Male Shepards than female.

 

They don't actually tell you that.  It's very dangerous to make that assumption

 

 

 

 

Since women make up roughly 40% of console gamers, much higher in mobile gaming, (using the stats from the previous page) I'd expect the ratio of FemSheps to MaleSheps to match that roughly 4:6, but its closer to 2:8.  While you are right there is no way to tell firmly how many women played FemShep vs MaleShep but for argument's sake I will stick to the logical conclusion.  So I am forced to conclude that either women make up a smaller percentage of console gamers than previously believed, I find that unlikely, or the game was played predominately by men, more likely in my opinion, or there were significantly more women than men playing as the opposite gender Shepard, possible but a bit unlikely.

 

How about people that play through the game more than once?

 

 

As for Shepard being default, the options on the New Game Menu are:

 

Start Default Shepard (leads to Sheploo, Soldier, with preset service history)

Start Custom Male Shepard

Start Custom Female Shepard

 

So I don't see how the default Shepard being male would dissuade people who already have the game from playing a custom Shepard.

 

Which one is highlighted first?  Is there any chance that the game being a sequel alters its player base numbers from the console norm?  (i.e. was the damage already done with ME1?)

[Allan Schumacher]

Once again, if people are too lazy to fully explore all the options available to them they cannot complain about the options they have.

 

I disagree emphatically.

 

The problem I have with your dismissal is that it dismisses those that feel the game isn't marketed to them.  But you use the data to confirm that the game shouldn't be marketed to them.  This is a dangerous conclusion to make.

 

 

It gives me basis to draw a logical conclusion.

 

The most important thing to realize about drawing logical conclusions is that your logic can be wrong.  It often is, and it's something that I learned a long time ago.

 

Further, stating that it's a logical conclusion implies that you don't know the answer (which is true... it's true for me).  Just remember that.