Larian Studios - Swen In Search of Women

Myrthos

Myrthos

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On his blog, Swen Vincke mentioned he discovered that the statistics from Kickstarter and Facebook show that only a very small portion of their visitors are women, which doesn't compute with his own experience. That experience is derived from his home situation and the women he meets on gameshows, which made him feel that at least a quarter or a third of the players are female.

One of the blind assumptions I’ve always made about Divinity: Original Sin is that many women play it. I never had any doubts about this because I saw my partner play D:OS for many hours. She’s quite picky about her games and likes RPGs, so I figured that if the game would be unappealing to her (or womanhood in general for that matter), she would’ve told me right away.

My feeling that many women play D:OS is further reinforced by the people I meet at trade-shows. For every two or three male fans, there’s always at least one woman. Based on that, my lazy mind concluded that at least 25% to 33% of our audience is female, if not more (given that trade-shows are not exactly gender balanced).

I never really questioned this number because it fit with the split I saw for events like PAX. According to this report for instance, 35% of PAX visitors is female, and I think of PAX players as players who would typically enjoy D:OS.

But then this morning, I saw a number that didn’t compute at all. According to the Google analytics page for our Kickstarter campaign, only 4,19% of the page’s visitors is female versus 95.81% male! WTF?
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More information.
 
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That is because women dont like to show the fact that they like to play games nor do they crowdfund that much. Is it really that hard to comprehend?
 
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Thinking that one's own experiences represents the whole is often fraught with invalid conclusions. I do not know if that is the case here but that's what jumped out at me regarding the conclusions based upon individual perceptions in specific situations.
 
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hmm, how does Google analytic determine who is a woman and who isn't? I checked and kickstarter doesn't seems to keep that info in the account profile, so it can't be from there.
 
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Lots of families have credit cards or their paypal account in one name. Not trying to sound or be sexist it is in the male of the families name.

The one we use for online is one we can preload and has no name to it.
 
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Maybe the women he saw at the conventions are players' girlfriends :)
 
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It has to be socially acceptable for women to adopt gaming at large. Its a wider culture issue unfortunately and there are a lot of hostile people on the internet.

This is why casual gaming has taken off. If my friends are doing it then its okay for me to do it and so on.
 
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azarhal said:
hmm, how does Google analytic determine who is a woman and who isn't? I checked and kickstarter doesn't seems to keep that info in the account profile, so it can't be from there.
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Google analytic is the process that tracks everything you do while signed onto anything google. So if you are logged in as Azarhal in rpgwatch but also as Dave Smith on gmail... analytic can tell that a male has visited RPGwatch.com
 
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They may be half the population but they aren't half the gamers. The % will also vary according to age and country as well. Higher % among younger and among those without children. They could very well represent 20-30% of gamers but you'll never see that by analyzing crowdfunding, internet data, etc. Men are also more likely to be hardcore gamers with women falling more into the casual category.
 
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I don't think Larian games are that attractive to most women, too many stupid male jokes and other silly stuff.
 
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First of all I am not sure if you actually have to enter a gender with google. Also it might set male to the standard gender. Maybe someone who recently created a googleaccount can tell ;)

Also while a big percentage of players are females, I am pretty sure that the % becomes less quite fast if you go more and more hardcore and less casual.
Like RPGwatch for example. You need to be a hardcore gamer to a certain extent to actually visit forums of games of a genre you like.
My father and my mother are actually playing games, too. And my father is also playing MMOs, but he would hardly ever post into a forum (even though he plays quite a lot). My mother is even much, much further "away" from a state I'd call hardcore gamer.
You need to be in a certain bunch to participate on pages like RPGwatch. I don't know if it's just 4%, I guess it is a little more, but I think the tendency is comparable with the one they see on kickstarter. And the distribution might even become more harsh if you limit it to posters with 100, 500, 1000 postings or so. Maybe a mod can tell us more about that.
 
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Wanna make ur game appealing to womens?
Then dumb it down!
As a general rule this crowd care less about complex systems and deep mechanics. They want to experience the narrative without any nuisances like difficulties, choices, options or any activity that require you to stop and think.
 
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Edgy said:
Wanna make ur game appealing to womens?
Then dumb it down!
As a general rule this crowd care less about complex systems and deep mechanics. They want to experience the narrative without any nuisances like difficulties, choices, options or any activity that require you to stop and think.
Click to expand...

And you have some kind of study or research to back this up I assume? Or just something you pulled out of your ass. This thread stinks.
 
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Edgy said:
Wanna make ur game appealing to womens?
Then dumb it down!
As a general rule this crowd care less about complex systems and deep mechanics. They want to experience the narrative without any nuisances like difficulties, choices, options or any activity that require you to stop and think.
Click to expand...

come now, I assume you're trolling or dare I say it...being "edgy"?
 
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azarhal said:
hmm, how does Google analytic determine who is a woman and who isn't? I checked and kickstarter doesn't seems to keep that info in the account profile, so it can't be from there.
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I am surprised you even ask this question. Google knows everything :) Jokes aside, Google analytic is very accurate. Companies pay big bugs to get details info from them for marketing purposes.

These days women are playing more computer games however if you go towards hardcore spectrum you will find less and less of them.
 
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I bet you the number of women who played D:OS is around 50% Just none of them talk about it or crowdfund it. I think they feel it makes them unsexy or something.
 
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My wife adores Larian games - Divine Divinity, Beyond Divinity (!) and Original Sin are amongst her favourite games. Heck, I even bought her the collectors edition of OS from the Larian store as it came out just in time for her birthday.

However, when it comes to buying or Kickstarter-ing, or even just following games online, that's left to me. Her attitude is that she wants to play the game when it comes out, but until it does, she's got other things to do.
 
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booboo said:
come now, I assume you're trolling or dare I say it…being "edgy"?
Click to expand...

Lemonhead said:
And you have some kind of study or research to back this up I assume? Or just something you pulled out of your ass. This thread stinks.
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Are you guys idiots or are you playing dumb?

Everyone here knows that most people who play hardcore games are guys. Women play causal games like candy crash and other facebook stuff and only a small minority of them play the games you play.
Why? Because they are complex to them. They don't want to invest the time and effort we spend on games. They want to start the game and immediately play it without the hassle of learning how to.

Why the fuck do you think AAA games are so dumb this days?
Why bioware is so foucesed on turning its games to cinematic experiences instead of making them better games?

To cater to casuals- and the women group among them.
By making the games easier to digest, pubs attempt to lure this demographic to buy their games.

Hell, just look at the fan base of tales of series that goes to tales of festival con. Almost all of them are women.
What do they like about the games? The characters, the story, the costumes. Not the battle systems, character growth and other systems related to gameplay, and Namco acknowledge that.

But no, I am just an edgy person therefore my arguments are invaild.
 
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hmmm - Wikipedia:
Differences between the genders

Some differences between gamers may also have to do with fundamental taste differences between the sexes. Both Sid Meier and Shigeru Miyamoto have discussed their inability to get their wives to play videogames despite decades as game designers and, in Meier's case, her also working in the industry. A few game genres have traditionally seen higher female gamer percentages than the others. There has been persistent female interest, for example, in action-adventure games. This has more recently translated into an interest in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Second Life.Women have also been shown to prefer role-playing video games to first-person shooters, and Thomas W. Malone of Stanford University found that girls preferred to play a Hangman video game over a darts simulation that boys enjoyed. While male audiences prefer fast-paced explosive action and combat, women tend to prefer in-game communication and interpersonal relationships (character development and plot dynamics). In-game activities may also differ between the sexes in games with less linear plots such as the Grand Theft Auto series. It has been suggested that developers can learn what girls want in a game by observing similarities in how different girl teams will react to and modify a game if given the opportunity.

Some male players in MMOs are more oriented to achievement based play while females choose to become more social. Most females play video games when a male is present. Typically playing with the other gender can be viewed as a partnership for both players and can improve their online communication with one another. On the other hand, some critics have suggested that genre preferences are not as important a difference between the genders as the quality of the games played. Women are often characterized as preferring story-driven games or constructive games like The Sims or Civilization, but this is not universally true.
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Judging by the females here on RPGWatch, I can't see a big difference between female and male gamers. Tastes vary.
 
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