I used to follow a lot of gaming/nerd sites from back in the day when they catered to gamers/nerds and then started blocking them once they became corporate shills but I still get some articles in my feed and one of the gaming related articles threw out the "women make up half of all gamers" stat. I have no idea how in the world they came up with this stat, but if anyone who has been into gaming for a while would know there is something off about that. I've heard that they count someone playing candy crush or someone like my grandmother playing solitaire on their computer.
Now I get some games can appeal to more women than men. One of my guilty pleasures is the Sims and I've read that has a 60/40 women to men ratio which I can believe (of course the article was celebrating that point), but certain kinds of games like action, FPS, rpg, and sports would probably skew more male I would guess. Reminds me of how they try to push the 50/50 stat with comic books and they seem to include people who at the height of the MCU would claim to be comic book fans because they saw an Avengers movie.
Of course there are women who are into gaming, but the actual female gamers get little attention since they want to play games and not whine about the patriarchy. This whole thing does remind me of something someone posted on this site before. He said that if you want to know if a hobby is male dominated, just look at all the articles calling it "toxic". Take literature for example. I am a huge reader but I would say that women tend to be more hardcore readers than men, but something like Sci-fi is a genre that appeals to guys so we get endless lectures about females in Sci-Fi. Sci-Fi/Fantasy is my favorite genre to read but another genre I like is crime drama/murder mystery and since there are quite a few female authors I've never seen anyone complain about that. So I guess that is a good rule of thumb.
Sorry for the long post, but I am so sick of that stat!
With this data it always surprises me that they still insist on marketing heavily to women in a game like an action shooter. Or the Battlefield 5 debacle. But that data makes sense. It seems the major companies ignore it
The major publishers see only 10% of their player base are female, and their takeaway is “we need to cater to women because that’s our greatest demo for potential growth”. The feminist executives back up this retarded logic because they’re activists posing as developers. In reality, when you alter your successful products to cater to the people who don’t like them, you only end up alienating your established customers.
This has happened in comic books as well. Add in the unwillingness to acknowledge that men and women tend to enjoy different things. Just annoys me because you don’t see publishers of romance novels bending over backwards to cater to males
I saved a retail business years ago that fell for this meme. A big corpo (big for this area) opened a new chain of stores catering to women and "families" and they were all failing. They brought me in as a regional expert to try and salvage the situation. I ran the numbers and what I found was that, as the CEO had said to me, women were in fact the fastest growing part of the market for the past 4 years. But when I looked hard and shook off the bullshit, what I saw was that women had expanded from being <1% of the market to about 3.5%. So the growth rate was very high, but they were still a maximum of 4% of the fucking market. And these guys had been tailoring their entire business model around catering to them at the expense of the 96% of the market that were MEN. The assumption was "ah men like this stuff anyway, they'll still show up just for the product even if the presentation is safe, sterile, and women-friendly"
No, no they fucking didn't. I went through that place with a fire axe and reoriented everything for a better male experience. It took 18 months and butting heads with feminist middle management, but I got HR on my side and turned that business from being a 30k/mo loss for the company to a moneymaker.