Does the gender of a game's protagonist affect sales?

Question

Most protagonists of games are male. I imagine the conventional wisdom is that this is because

1. We live in a patriarchal society, especially when it comes to game development, and
2. The target demographic is predominantly male.

I once heard that for fiction, females are more able to empathise with a male character, than males are with a female character. So the great imbalance in gender in fiction is not necessarily due to patriarchy, but that it just makes sense from a financial point of view. I'm not sure if I subscribe to that, but it is interesting.

And there was a time when gaming was for super hardcore nerdy males, but now almost everybody has a games machine, and it is not a stigma to like games as it once was, I don't know if it is such a male domain any more.

So leaving aside any question of whether we should try to reduce gender stereotypes, my question is, does having a female protagonist actually affect sales, in particular, for small indie games? Are there any experiments, statistics or research relating to this question? What is the actual demographic breakdown of gamers these days?

I realise this is an inflammatory subject, so I will stress here that I am not looking for opinions:

I am looking for hard facts and data.

Answer 1

I don't think you can prove that "having a female protagonist actually affect sales, in particular, for small indie games?" And I don't think the sex of the lead character will deter people from buying games. Allow me to explain.

The article where an investor said he would not invest in a game with a female lead "You can't have a female character in games. It has to be a male character, simple as that.". The guy was a sexist person with a sexist attitude making great assumptions about buyer attitudes. Read the comments below the article for a response to that.

So that's one isolated instance of somebody saying something sexist like that. Of course, they didn't say who it was, whether he was big time or small time, or whether at all he knew the market he was trying to sell to.

So anyway, without a carefully controlled study/social experiment (each same game quality, exact same fun level, only thing changed: lead male becomes female), it's not really possible to tell if there is an effect or not. But I urge you to think about this rationally and not let sexist attitudes of a couple of people dominate your thinking. Have you ever avoided a game title because the lead was female? I personally have not. Have your friends? Has anybody you know? Why would the market respond negatively to a female lead then?

Now consider the following notable games with female protagonists, leads, or main characters (by no means complete):

• Final Fantasy 6 (Terra). Terra was the only magic user in a world where magic had all but disappeared (and was forbidden). The majority of the story centers around her, particularly the early parts of the game.
• Portal. A "maze-shooter" with a female lead character who you see in mirrors at the beginning of the game.
• Mario Bros 2 : Had princess toadstool, who was arguably the best for beginners to use (since she could float for 5s)
• Warcraft 3 - The Night Elves are a matriarchal society. 2 of the heroes for the race are female including Maiev and Tyranda
• Tomb Raider featured Lara Croft.

There are a lot more games listed here featuring female protagonists.

So in short, I don't believe having a female role prevents the game from selling. I think how well the game is made, how fun it is, etc, dominate the scales in terms of people liking the game. The isolated sexist people who say things like "It won't sell because the lead is female" are simply speculating and projecting their sexist views on the entire market.

Answer 2

Old Opinions

A game recently came out called Remember Me. The sad thing about this game is that for most people it flew under the radar. Why? The studio, Dontnod, attempted to get funding and support from multiple investors but couldn't so they weren't able to advertise. Investors did not one to sink money into the game for one major reason, the lead was female. There was a scene where the character's past is explored and she kisses a man, which the investors thought that the male population wouldn't want to see.

Whether or not they were right is not the point, Dontnod couldn't get support due to the lack of faith by the investors, so when it came time to sell their product it flopped due to a rather small and under budget advertising department.

The Honest Truth

So then where does this leave us, is making a female lead wrong? Is there a large male gamer population than female? Let's look at the Sales, Demographic, and Usage Data provided by the Entertainment Software Association. On page 5 it shows that 47% of all gamers are female. What does this mean?

Knowing who all of Dontnod's investors were is impossible but it is a safe assumption that they were male, or just overly cautious about the male consumers. Could the game have done better with more investments, maybe; was it a female lead that caused it to crash, no.

Strong Female Leads

There are several examples of female leads in games that did great: Konoko from Bungie's Oni, Lara Croft from Square Enix's Tomb Raider, and Samus Aran from Nintendo's Metroid.

Conclusion

I would post more links to show what I mean, but I can't due to the posting limitations, to make a long post simple:

The gaming industry catered towards males for the past twenty years, but as this newest generation began to grow up with technology, the internet, and video games, the gender gap began to close. Sure there are still people out there who will argue against it, but having a female lead shouldn't affect your game much, so long as the character is interesting.

Personally

Personal opinion I would never even second guess adding a female to a cast or even making her the lead. If it works with what you are going with than do it, as well as the fact that if more leads are given to female character's than eventually the amount of female leads will be similar to that of males.

Answer 3

Game development is also about creating something that gives a "feeling" to the user. You have to set a tone to the game and by setting the tone you can speak to the public outside. Todd Howard has talked about this and I find him inspiring.

I personally think that data as you want is not reliable because, even if available, it does not preclude the fact that you might find an idea for a game that will attract female users and male user with the same ratio because the range of devices that support video game has increased and they have a wider reach (see Nintendo Wii and Smartphones).

For me the focus should be about story telling. Any good story if well implemented is potentially successfull and hence any gender "choice" could be potentially valid as you could find an idea that breaks into an unknown market :).

However... so far mine is a subjective answer and I wanted to provide you with also some links to published research on this matter so you can have some hard core data and facts to analyze and come up with your own conclusions:

• Book "Ethnographies of the Videogame"

• Article investigating gender differences in videogames

• Another article (not directly answering the question but here you might find some interesting isnights and you could pheraphs search on google for the authors name and see if they have done other research on the matter)

• Another article.., interesting as it discusses also aggressivity. This might be a factor to consider when targeting the game (I like to think about Street Fighter, most characters are male but some are female and in my experience both male and female user play the game with both genders)

• This looks at the demographic

• This article instead focuses on female teenager gaming, I reccomend it

In short:

There is evidence that the demographic of game players are also feemale teenegares (cit 7) and if you want to make your player FEEL something you will have to think what YOUR GAME wants to TELL. If it is a story about a FAIRY then the characters will be mostly female, if it is a story about a solider of the 2nd World War then the character could be MALE (but you could have a FEMALE character as supporting character for specific missions - eg. one character is the solider and needs to do certain missions the othe is a nurse and needs to do other missions -save people- and the overall mission score is combined in a co-op multiplayer experience). Again there is no definite and final answer on this. Fantasy is the beauty and power of video games (I have no data to prove this :-)).

My conclusion is that is UP TO US to create something groundbreaking that will attract both female and male gender and that ANY research in this field is limited as videogames are increasing their users reach day by day (see what is happening with the Nintendo Wii, families and older people play... it kind of made consoles cool also for eldery people which is an achievement to me and suggests that gaming can be for everyone + see what is happening with smartphone games where you see people playing on smartphones everwhere and with any gender, thing that was not seen with portable consoles).

Answer 4

Although it does, it isn't the most defining trait. What defines characters is how they act, look, talk, move. The gender has an effect of each one of these traits, but to what extent it depends entirely on the designer.

An example of a female character with almost entirely male characteristics is Byonetta. She is basically a female Dante and she is female in order to appeal more to the teenager audiance.

Take Elizabeth from the newest Bioshock for an amazing example for a character who has great depth and is female. Even though she isn't the main character, she is a more developed character than Booker.

Tl;dr: Yes it does, though not alone. When the gender is combined with looks, talk acting it can help appeal to a certain audance therefore increasing sales.

Edit: Let's add another pawn on the table. In order to have a main character, you must have some sort of naritive, if you have some sort of naritive, then it is expected for the player to bond with the character. It would appear that male gamers (which are the majority of single player gamers) have harder time bonding with female characters? Maybe... On the other hand we have Portal, which has huge sucsess and guess what, has a female protagonist. There are a lot of factors. I want to point your attention to two things. One of them is this quote:

In terms of pure sales numbers, in the first three months of availability, games with only a male hero sold around 25 percent better than games with an optional female hero. Games with exclusively male heroes sold around 75 percent better than games with only female heroes.

And the other is this link: http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/games-with-female-heroes-dont-sell-because-publishers-dont-support-them

These guys have done an amazing job and I don't want to rip-off their hard work, so just read the article. I think it gives a lot of good points to think on.