If you want to add sex appeal to your game for your audience, you'd need to understand WHAT your audience LIKES. How much is too much or too little as, through this may seem sacrilege, there is a thing as too much for boobs and ass.
And since you're already in that mind frame, you'll naturally start going 'now my character appeals to the audience, what about other things like music, scenery, gameplay etc'. The problem with a lot of these western studios is they start adversarial to their audience which is one of the reasons we end up with so many ugly women main characters.
The biggest untapped market for any product is people who don’t like or need that product. The best way to attract that untapped market is to change your product into something completely different that appeals to those people. Frequently, these changes are literally antithetical to the original product.
But the audience for gaming was already fully locked in. Most of us already had been since before we were ten. They had a customer base more passionate and dedicated than any other product could ever dream of.
There were people who bought multiple systems just so they could have all of them, there were guys whose entire bedrooms were trophy rooms of merch and bedspreads and DVD box sets and painted models & figurines, many of them still host their YouTube channels and podcasts from them.
My point is the “untapped market” for gaming was ridiculously tiny and didn’t care about video games anyway. They didn’t understand them, they never followed the franchises, never watched the movies, never read the comics, never bought the games.
Looking at THOSE people and thinking, “OMG we’re gonna make so much more money if we just appeal to them also” is as retarded as trying to force ass and titties into Hallmark movies.
But what’s worse is they didn’t just try to appeal to the wrong audience, they actively told their far BIGGER existing audience to all go fuck ourselves. Over and over and over for a decade now. And yeah there’s been a bit of a cultural shit recently, but the studios are all still churning out woke slop, pushing all digital, jacking up prices and hiring activists.
You’d assume that decades and decades of advertising and marketing strategy had to have taught them this would all end in laughable disaster, but it’s like they honesty all believed the paychecks from Soros or USAID (or whoever) would never run out. Either that, or they deliberately WANT the industry to die.
Sucker Punch do actually understand what their audience likes in many respects, which is how they were able to be so insidious with the original Ghost of Tsushima. It is in many ways a more competent fantasy depiction of Japan than Rise of the Ronin which I'm playing right now, in the open world aspect alone. Sucker Punch know for example that gaming is full of unabashed weebs who want to be a cool samurai, run around a stylised version of japan with nice graphics, climb vertiginous temple complexes, stroke furry foxes, bow to the honoraburru dead, pretend they watch B&W samurai movies, etc. and so they gave them all that, to a high level of competency.
This unfortunately blinded gamers to all the blatant feminism: every woman ugly, henpecked protagonist doing everything an angry woman wants, a dozen girlbosses, lesbians and gays, two fat BBWs starring in the mongol invasion on opposite sides, the complete absence of female grunt enemies despite their lopsided presence as named badasses, absence of female accountability, all the men exclusively being weak/cruel/naive, the worthlessness of tradition except for temples being colourful climbing frames, the lack of any question of heterosexual romance in the main narrative despite the fact that Jin is meant to continue his uncle's legacy... And so Yotei being what it is comes as a betrayal only to some (and fwiw that social media photo of all the women in the dev team, captioned 'Ghost of Yotei', is from 2018).
So I think we're at a stage that the propaganda just becomes more insidious the more competent a dev is and the better they understand gamers. I'm fine with them misunderstanding us, so that they go bankrupt quicker. I actually don't think it balances out if a company gives me a fun experience which understands my desires well in one respect - raking in the normie bucks - if they're simultaneously trying to shoehorn their ideological agenda in behind my enjoyment. When it comes to a game like that I think one should pirate it at most (which is what I did for Tsushima). I actually paid for Disco Elysium, in contrast, although I wouldn't do so nowadays - at least those guys admitted they're hardcore commies and my money went towards nothing but the comedic collapse of their studio.
The “hot vs ugly female character” is really a proxy argument. The existence of a hot female isn’t a necessary condition for a good story, but ugly characters are a leading indicator for bad stories. The underlying issue, as you’ve said here, is woke stories/characters. It’s about wall-to-wall girl bosses. It’s about every capable, brave, and good side character being a woman while every weak, cowardly, or evil side character is a man. It’s about insufferable feminist archetypes and behaviors dictating character personalities and story beats. You could theoretically have a very based story full of based characters who are all very ugly, but this is not a realistic possibility in our Darwinian reality. Leftists abuse aesthetics simultaneous to their abuse of story and character.
You could theoretically have a very based story full of based characters who are all very ugly
Ironically in the very game we are discussing the ugly character, Yuna, is one of the better written ones whose "badassery" is realistic to what women could do against grown soldiers. Thievery, sneaking, and cheap shots while running from basically everything, and she is butt ugly from living a life of that as a street urchin.
She gets underplayed a lot, because the other big storyline women (archer girl and samurai widow lesbian) are pure Woke nonsense. But its a show that the devs behind this are aware of all these problems, and are actively choosing to write in the direction they are.
Better written ones but i still remember her pissing me off with her feminist writing. I think quality of writing for her was accidental and she's not really likeable though for good reasons.
This is TRUE but under the wrong PREMISE.
If you want to add sex appeal to your game for your audience, you'd need to understand WHAT your audience LIKES. How much is too much or too little as, through this may seem sacrilege, there is a thing as too much for boobs and ass.
And since you're already in that mind frame, you'll naturally start going 'now my character appeals to the audience, what about other things like music, scenery, gameplay etc'. The problem with a lot of these western studios is they start adversarial to their audience which is one of the reasons we end up with so many ugly women main characters.
The biggest untapped market for any product is people who don’t like or need that product. The best way to attract that untapped market is to change your product into something completely different that appeals to those people. Frequently, these changes are literally antithetical to the original product.
But the audience for gaming was already fully locked in. Most of us already had been since before we were ten. They had a customer base more passionate and dedicated than any other product could ever dream of.
There were people who bought multiple systems just so they could have all of them, there were guys whose entire bedrooms were trophy rooms of merch and bedspreads and DVD box sets and painted models & figurines, many of them still host their YouTube channels and podcasts from them.
My point is the “untapped market” for gaming was ridiculously tiny and didn’t care about video games anyway. They didn’t understand them, they never followed the franchises, never watched the movies, never read the comics, never bought the games.
Looking at THOSE people and thinking, “OMG we’re gonna make so much more money if we just appeal to them also” is as retarded as trying to force ass and titties into Hallmark movies.
But what’s worse is they didn’t just try to appeal to the wrong audience, they actively told their far BIGGER existing audience to all go fuck ourselves. Over and over and over for a decade now. And yeah there’s been a bit of a cultural shit recently, but the studios are all still churning out woke slop, pushing all digital, jacking up prices and hiring activists.
You’d assume that decades and decades of advertising and marketing strategy had to have taught them this would all end in laughable disaster, but it’s like they honesty all believed the paychecks from Soros or USAID (or whoever) would never run out. Either that, or they deliberately WANT the industry to die.
I can’t tell anymore either way
Sucker Punch do actually understand what their audience likes in many respects, which is how they were able to be so insidious with the original Ghost of Tsushima. It is in many ways a more competent fantasy depiction of Japan than Rise of the Ronin which I'm playing right now, in the open world aspect alone. Sucker Punch know for example that gaming is full of unabashed weebs who want to be a cool samurai, run around a stylised version of japan with nice graphics, climb vertiginous temple complexes, stroke furry foxes, bow to the honoraburru dead, pretend they watch B&W samurai movies, etc. and so they gave them all that, to a high level of competency.
This unfortunately blinded gamers to all the blatant feminism: every woman ugly, henpecked protagonist doing everything an angry woman wants, a dozen girlbosses, lesbians and gays, two fat BBWs starring in the mongol invasion on opposite sides, the complete absence of female grunt enemies despite their lopsided presence as named badasses, absence of female accountability, all the men exclusively being weak/cruel/naive, the worthlessness of tradition except for temples being colourful climbing frames, the lack of any question of heterosexual romance in the main narrative despite the fact that Jin is meant to continue his uncle's legacy... And so Yotei being what it is comes as a betrayal only to some (and fwiw that social media photo of all the women in the dev team, captioned 'Ghost of Yotei', is from 2018).
So I think we're at a stage that the propaganda just becomes more insidious the more competent a dev is and the better they understand gamers. I'm fine with them misunderstanding us, so that they go bankrupt quicker. I actually don't think it balances out if a company gives me a fun experience which understands my desires well in one respect - raking in the normie bucks - if they're simultaneously trying to shoehorn their ideological agenda in behind my enjoyment. When it comes to a game like that I think one should pirate it at most (which is what I did for Tsushima). I actually paid for Disco Elysium, in contrast, although I wouldn't do so nowadays - at least those guys admitted they're hardcore commies and my money went towards nothing but the comedic collapse of their studio.
Good post.
The “hot vs ugly female character” is really a proxy argument. The existence of a hot female isn’t a necessary condition for a good story, but ugly characters are a leading indicator for bad stories. The underlying issue, as you’ve said here, is woke stories/characters. It’s about wall-to-wall girl bosses. It’s about every capable, brave, and good side character being a woman while every weak, cowardly, or evil side character is a man. It’s about insufferable feminist archetypes and behaviors dictating character personalities and story beats. You could theoretically have a very based story full of based characters who are all very ugly, but this is not a realistic possibility in our Darwinian reality. Leftists abuse aesthetics simultaneous to their abuse of story and character.
Ironically in the very game we are discussing the ugly character, Yuna, is one of the better written ones whose "badassery" is realistic to what women could do against grown soldiers. Thievery, sneaking, and cheap shots while running from basically everything, and she is butt ugly from living a life of that as a street urchin.
She gets underplayed a lot, because the other big storyline women (archer girl and samurai widow lesbian) are pure Woke nonsense. But its a show that the devs behind this are aware of all these problems, and are actively choosing to write in the direction they are.
Better written ones but i still remember her pissing me off with her feminist writing. I think quality of writing for her was accidental and she's not really likeable though for good reasons.
Yeah this is a great comment. I tried GoT twice and disliked the strong whamen and the many SweetBabyism’s in the game.
Only reason people ever thought it was based is because at the time it was being compared to TLOU2
Way too many people need to hear this message.
Yeah but dude, Mileena then vs Mileena now.
Even my wife was like, “Why’d they make her look 45?”