Ubisoft Director says “Women Don’t Sell”

@Thorne17 Almost all Final Fantasy games have a male lead character. Only 2 star a female lead. VI, and XIII. Unless if Noctis came out as a trans woman and I missed that shocking twist in the gaming zeitgeist. And, our gaming hobby is almost evenly split among male and female gamers. But the games that get more limelight, tend to be marketed heavily to teenage/college-age males. "Dominate" isn't the right word. More like "men tend to THINK there aren't many female gamers". There's a lot. But so many games feature women in skimpy clothing, or burly men with guns, etc, and some women look at those games and (understandably) assume "well clearly gaming isn't for me". We need to fix that. It's fine for a female character to be sexy, and hey, sexy games have their place! But maybe, we can do away with female characters getting increasingly more revealing armor as they level up while the dudes get more extravagant, ornate armor. Perhaps we can advertise more games that aren't full-tilt "macho" along with the ones that are. And we should definitely remind these big game companies that WOMEN PLAY GAMES, until it finally sinks in.

@Thorne17 One of the primary reasons that AAA console and PC games have worse sales when the lead character is female is simply that those games are male orientated games - a lot more men (rightly or wrongly) want to image themselves to be muscly heros working alone to conquer the world... the list of AAA console games fitting that is almost endless... CoD, Battlefront, Doom, Uncharted, Far Cry, Assasin's Creed... Those with female leads are also heavily dominated by long heros working alone to conquer the world; Tomb Raider, Horizon Zero Dawn, etc. Those games that are not individual based often don't have such a strong lean on male (or muscled) leads - Final Fantasy (which I'd argue to ensemble more than single lead in a lot of cases), League of Legends, Dota, Civilisation, The Sims, ... this overlaps into there being no definitive lead, no player character or representation or no gender involed at all or every gender. So to label games as a whole worse selling with female leads is clearly a stupid statement, some genres might not sell as well with female leads but those genres are probably those that societies currently label as more male orientated and so males feel more inclined to play to conform to gender stereotypes. The breakouts are ones that either do better job of marketing to the female audience (who might well be more decerning having had to put up with decades of games where female characters were put down, sidelined or portrayed in other negtive ways - there was a time when a female character meant a character that would be betraying you - either accidentally or purposefully) or do a better job of balancing the roles and modes of play better within the game, allowing more varied play styles other than the one "crush, kill, destroy" that past male hero fantasies portrayed (and continue to portray in some games by some publishers).

@geekypeaky Women absolutely play games, as many, if not more, women in my life play computer games than men (at least where I have that information). Always have since I had two sisters who were as keen on gaming as I was. The most avid gamers I know are all female with one except (who is an avid boardgame geek rather than video game geek!) Also; Cloud is in the closet too ;) :P - maybe genderfluid?! :D

@Thorne17 The more famous females in development constantly preach about things that dont, they make a game they want to play not that the wider market wants to play.. There is just a general bias in general. People and many women themselves feel they need to be protected from criticism etc.. So much so Zoe Quinn accused that other dev of rape despite it never happening and he killed himself.. and she knew he would thats why she did it.. and never faced accountability for it.. Its those people even females need to hold to the fire.. Theyre are progressing the reinforcement of not allowing new anything in. If more women stood up and called a spade a spade rather than feeling compelled to blindly support them it wouldnt be as abundant and in your face.. You attack an industry its going to stand up for itself and wear armor.. This website supports these things.. Rooster Teeth fired vic despite no proof and we have since found out Monica totally lied and ruined vics career and no apology from RT.. while the CEO awhile back got caught for sexual harassment and shit after that instance and stepped down quietly and all the employees shut their mouths.. They also blindly support Mia Khalifa who as of the last few days has officially been proving to have been lying about how she was manipulated in to porn and made only 20k.. She admitted after BangBros brought recipients and exposed her and she admitted she made over 100k and was in the industry for 3 years not 8 months.. Backing up this behavior because women think they need to support women rather than good people.. Its heading the whole internet road down this no accountability, claimk they were death threats narrative while everyone else will be hesitant to let women in in general.. I mean its not like 1 or 2 outliers this is hundreds and hundreds of women. So idk.. it wont get better until the bias is actually acknowledged. Women may get more social shame but men get more direct punishment from their jobs and entertainment sites etc..The minute you protect anyone based on their identity or gender rather than hard evidence you're discriminating... I dont expect it to get better or happen less in the future either.. everyones very secure in their ignorance on all sides.

@zingiah I tend to play female characters given the choice - the reasons range from greater versitility, better voice actors, smaller hit boxes and thinner physical forms making stealth and damage avoidance easier. Sometimes I think the female characters are also less well playtested because I find some glitches are possible with them when they are not with male characters. In many games involving "social" skills female characters are better either on purpose or accidentally they tend to have options that are less extreme in consequence than male characters (assuming there is a difference - but only recently has there been a move to make male and female characters only different in appearance). Female characters also, as you say, have less ridiculous and more realistic designs (at least since the bikini armour has moved out of fashion, very slowly, like and iceburg... in more ways than one). Even when it comes to roles traditionally only held by men in literature, e.g. wizards, female characters are better designed; the traditional male wizard robe is terrible in actual combat if you need to move at all (it's why Gandalf doesn't, on the whole) whereas female wizard characters tend to have shorter, whispier clothes or dispense with long robes entirely! IT is a shame that breast plates for female fighters are still very clearly breast plates despite the terrible effect this would have in defending against arrows in real life but at least they have proper armour now! Mostly gone are the days of chain bikins for armour - though I think Conan might have had them but then again the males had a loin cloth so... fair's fair! :D

@zingiah also. i like looking at women more then men

@RiverRunning Arrows aren't even the worst part about "breast armour". That thing easily breaks the women's sternum if they get hit strongly by a sword/mace/hammer/whatever

@Hammlet I don't disagree that those are also bad parts of the armour design though I might disagree with the term "worst" depending on the time period - Roman time period, yes, "worst", medieval time period "arrows were worse" due simply to the fact that most battles would see both sides field archers before anything else and almost all cavalry (or men-at-arms - they very occassionally had breast plates) charges were done under fire from archers and so being hit with a blunt instrument was only an issue if you survived reaching the enemy under some pretty heavy fire - the chances of an arrow strike were quite high even if the chance of it penetrating normal armour was quite low (but that is something we could argue about all day, well decade or century to be honest and more is being (re)discovered all the time on that front! :D TLDR; getting hit while wearing that sort of "armour" would suggest strongly that it is not really armour at all since you'd be injured or dead after being hit solidly even once. It is why badly made mail is better than badly made plate and even more so when it comes to design - all assuming that the "armour" does indeed come between the weapon and your body! ;)

@geekypeaky It always makes me laugh when people say they only play as one type of character because they want to be able to relate to the player character... because that characters is never anything like themselves except in maybe one small aspect... and since when did people have a problem with playing an alien or robot in a game?!?! I'm sure they must sell pretty badly... oh, wait, Starcraft is two-thirds aliens, Tetris has no player character (pitching to the ghost democraphic? it would explain its popularity! ;) etc. etc. What you have to remember is that a sizable chunk (of male) gamers have a chronic lack of self-confidence and are ultimately just being hugely defensive, this is why so many AAA games that do well cater to the traditional male power fantasy - big muscled/powerful male who is a lone hero and gets his kicks from beating the ever living out of other weak males and (hopefully) getting the girl (not woman, she'd only backstab him)... cf fiction through the ages; from Star Wars (the first six) to Sherlock Holmes to King Arthur to The New Testament to The Odyssey. This is why numerous in the community are afraid of mainstream feminists... they fear the truth that those women are more powerful and confident and capable than them... and the boys ("men" seems an inappropriate term for such childish behaviour) are probably right but only because those had to grow up being told they were weaker but choose to fight against that societal discrimination so these boys only brought in on themselves! I guess you reap what you sow! :D

@RiverRunning In my opinion, I find that I would like a decision made on the sex of the character I'm playing, unless the character is a silent protagonist or a choose-your-own protagonist in the style of Cyberpunk 2077. In games that are story-driven in the way that Horizon ZD, or Final Fantasys, or The Last of Us 1 or Assassin's Creed before they gave the dual-character options in Odyssey are, I want my protagonist to be a singular protagonist and I want the developer to make the decision as to what sex they are. For example, I want my Lara Crofts to be Lara Croft. But if Tomb Raider were to feature a male protagonist, let's call him Larry Croft, then I would want the developers of that game to write him well. As for the Link = girl thing, Link is not a girl and never has been. It would make no sense, in the grand scheme of things, for there to be a female Link unless they brought that character in as a traveler from a different timeline ala Spiderverse. What I'm trying to say is that I don't care what sex my protagonist is unless the game is written poorly in support of that character decision. As a gamer, I want to connect with the characters that the developers create, but, as we saw with the most recent TLOU 2 debacle, when a story is written badly, it is hard to justify the choices made. Personally, I don't find a female Cloud (FF7) as compelling as the male one because of how the developers wrote Cloud; as this young military man who had a series of really messed-up things happen to him. I'm sure a female cloud would work, but the story would have to be completely different. Do I find a female Viking to be compelling and do I want to play a female Viking as of right now? No, I do not, because the Viking fighting style was strength- and brute force-based and I don't think a woman of that time-period would be able to hold her own on those battlefields. I think Ubisoft could WRITE her well, maybe by making the male MC be more brute force-based and write the female MC as having more parry skills, to let her exist on the battlefield but acknowledge that she had to adapt to be there. As for what you state about males in your second paragraph, I find it offensive, because it shows how shallow thoughts have become in this day and age. I think that sweeping your gaze over what you call a "sizable chunk of male gamers" and branding them one way is what is problematic in our gaming sphere. I believe it's this need to brand segments of the gamer-base as this or that that creates the toxicity that you blame only these male gamers for. Sure, there are male gamers out there that are "bros" and are defensive, but I would say that MOST male gamers just want to play good games. There are also good feminists out there who are promoting healthy messages to their communities, then there's a chunk of people who are off the deep end. In every group there are bad actors, but what you need to do is to stop thinking that since there are some bad actors that EVERYONE is a bad actor. Now, before you call me out for being sexist or against females in video games or something; I've been reading books my entire life. Many of those books had compelling, strong women in the lead role. In fact, I went through a period of time in my teens where I would say 70% of the books I would read had strong, well-written females as MCs or in the MC's group. I have nothing against women in video games. What I am against is offering choice to gamers and then not backing that choice up with strong writing, clarity about their decision and believablity.

@mosswind Absolutely agree that story is king... without a good story story based media is just not worth it... but then it's in the name so... the problem here is maybe that games is multigenre in that there are many games that are not story based/driven and many others where it is only a minor or side element. In fact, in the majority of big game titles the story might be the biggest element (of the single player) but it in no way defines it, I don't remember the last time a AAA visual novel came out and the big story games out there are almost all Indie games. This means that there are a lot of games out there who don't have to depend on such story writing as book authors and so can get away with some flaws which maybe makes them blind to when there are too many flaws... Edit: No, wait, I forgot about Telltale... everything they do is story, story, story... so I guess there are story only games but they are few developer dependent.

@NervousWallaby what the hell is going on with your punctuation?

@Devilsdemise Same

@Devilsdemise Same. Honestly, in my experience the female lead usually has the better voice acting. Mass Effect with f!Shep, AC with both Evie Frye and Cassandra, Dragon Age: Inquisition with the female British accent.

@Galm1 I mean is the cannonical character

@AWilson34 as much as I love Femshep, over 80% of all playthroughs were done with a male Shepard (Bioware themselves released this stat along with other decision done across the trilogy couple years ago). The data unfortunately backs Ubi's claim