New Games Suck... Or Is It Just Me?

Game of the year ***is voted on by mainly games journalists, and that part of the industry has the same problem as game development. The majority that are hired are men. It's not a good reflection of the gaming industry as a whole.

Notice the amount of single player games that win or are nominated? That's not a true reflection of what games people play and are invested in.

Also note the 'players voice' award for 2024, the only category publicly voted on. And although Wukong won that, 3 out of the 5 nominated are these cash cow games that are on mobile.

And lastly, the best indie game (and mobile game) winner, Balatro. A game doing very well on mobile too.

Mobile devices are meant for portability and convenience. The point is to use as little resources as possible, so nobody is really shocked that they don't compare with dedicated gaming devices. That's should be the expectation...

Here you go:
https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/



Your guesstimate isn't too far away from data. Candy crush can belong to match 3 category and the sims/animal crossing is probably pretty close to farm sims since they are simulation.

Also there are more genre that has more male than female, but those genre that has more female often sells a lot per title, or has extremely high download rate if it's f2p. I guess that's how the final ratio become close to 50/50.

Besides animal crossing, Stardew valley is another simulation game that sold over 40m copies, it's even made by 1 man. Those simulation games has extremely high ceilings on sales.

Mobile gaming is very different then PC / console gaming, it's an entirely different market segment with a very different marketing and monetization strategy. PC / console gaming requires high upfront investment of both money and time for the player, portable gaming requires very little. That low upfront investment is what created the Free-To-Play microtransaction plague. In the end the most profitable strategy was to use variable reward strategy to attack players who were vulnerable to gambling addiction. To make the trap large enough for those addicts to fall into they need a large amount of casual traffic, those purely F2P users only purpose is to generate hype and publicity to suck the addicts in.

What yourself and others are attempting to do is argue that a person playing candy crush on a train or bus is interchanging with someone playing GTA, CoD, FFXIV, or Clair Obscur. That is untrue prima facie and since I consider your intelligent enough to realize that, then the argument must be in bad faith.

It's the intellectual equivalent of categorizing bike cycle riders and motor cycle riders together because both groups use two wheeled transportation to go from one place to another. Then using that categorization to infer statements of fact or truth.

There are 2 types of definition for the term "gamer". One of them is people who belongs to "gamer culture", which is usually game nerds who would go online discussing which build is better, which game is better etc.

Gamer culture community generally exclude people who play candy crush and view them as different group. It's like how anime otakus would call non-anime fans "normie". Terms like gamer and otakus is more like a social identity in this case.

However most market analysis or research data will include anyone that has candy crush installed in their phone when they research for gamer population.

The reason is also simple: those data are meant to help business make better money decisions. They don't care about gamer identity, they only care about knowing who plays what and how many people.

I prefer to use the 2nd definition when we discuss this business, candy crush players still bring money so they can be included when we discuss money. But I can also understand why so many people who identify as gamers would exclude them.

Those Match 3 / family sim games must be doing some Eddie Hall esque heavy lifting compared to the 12 other genres of games that are 20% female played or less. Or...theyre chock full of quantity-over-quality fremium games.

But really, you post that chart and expect me to believe that its 50/50?

Huh? I don't care if you believe it's really 50/50 or not. I only read data and rephrase what data said. If data says male:female is 50/50 but only few categories has extremely high female demographics, then I am going to assume those 2 categories have higher number of users overall, before questioning if 50/50 data is real.

I am not saying poll data can't have errors btw, I just need other more detailed evidence to prove 50/50 poll is wrong before I draw such conclusions, which I am too lazy to get into atm


That's mobile industry for you.

Keep in mind the data from that chart is from 2016 so we are talking 8-9 years ago. 9 years is a long time in the gaming industry. This is pre-pandemic, so there might be some shifting around with those genre percentages now.

For all of human history it has been accepted that men and women are fundamentally different, we have wildly different instinctive behaviors and psychology due to how we both evolved. We are animals, we have the same basic instinctive behaviors built in as every other animal does. We just have a conscious brain built ontop of it.

Only over the past 20-30 years has academia moved away from factual scientific information, to institutionalized deception for what they see as "social good". As such we have all had it hammered into us that men and women are identical, that we are interchangeable and so any differences are purely the result of society and sexism. A lot of people have bought into this nonsense, and so we now live in a society where people cannot understand why women don't fundamentally like playing CoD or Street Fighter.

Men and women like different forms of entertainment, men and women prefer doing different kinds of jobs. If you force women into masculine jobs they are not going to be happy in those roles (in general, there is some variance but speaking "the norm"), because they are fundamentally opposed to their psychology. This is why women prefer to be in social jobs, even if they pay less and if there is immense pressure put on them to do jobs better suited at men. If you try to force women to play games aimed at male psychology (competitive, aggressive, hierarchy etc), they are not going to enjoy those on the same primal level and if the companies try to censor the games to make them more appealing to women, they will still fail and also make the games less enjoyable to men. ie sports games or CoD.

Women prefer a very specific kind of game/movie aimed squarely at their lizard feminine brain, and games with high numbers of women tend to have very specific types of content. XIV is a very good example of a game aimed squarely at women, and it's actually very predatory to women and their psychology when you look at it that way. In the same way XI is predatory and addictive to men.

Men have long dictated what women can or cannot do. Also equal does not mean identical by the way. You can treat someone equally while still understanding their differences :)

Forcing gender stereotypes on children is just as bad as anything else.

Actually, I clicked on the original link and it doesnt even say 50:50, it says 53% male 46% female....

Yeah, 7% difference so it's not even close to equal....why do people say 50:50 and accuse the data for being incorrect LOL.

Who is like that?

Whenever I link an academic research paper they always separate male and female if that's a relevant research factor.

Here is one Harvard research on "Study reveals role of microglia in adolescent development different for males, females"

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/gender-clues

So the idea that academia doesn't separate male/female difference is just silly.

Same can be said for business/marketing industry. Who view male and female as one single demographic when they pitch a product or do market research, exactly? They always separate both demographics and they even separate demographics further than that.

I just linked multiple game market data that clearly separate male and female preference in their data. I have never hear anyone who do business and pretend every demographic has the same preference.

>Men have long dictated what women can or cannot do.

Why do you think that is. Why do you think men and women evolved to be the exact way they are, why is it that no matter where a race of people evolved it's the same in every one of them. Almost everything we do is because of our evolution and our psychology, and because it was the best avenue for our survival.

Why are male gorillas aggressive and territorial, why aren't the female gorillas doing that? are they just lazy? Are male silverbacks sexist for wanting to be in charge, and need some feminist teachings to be better at picking lice out of each others hair instead of guarding against intruders?

Males evolved to be the protectors of a tribe and have the physical and psychological traits best suited to that role, females evolved to establish and build the community of that tribe so there wasn't constant infighting or an inability to survive together (you can even see this influence in the types of video games men and women prefer to play). Men are/were not the way they are cause they decided to be be, this is the peak survival tactic and so it became the norm everywhere cause it worked.

If men had not been this way, and women had not been the way they are none of us would be even here to talk about it now. Cause we would have all died out long ago, our children would have died in the early years and our tribes would have been decimated.

Keep in mind we did not have nuclear weapons, police and the army to protect us for most of our history, we lived in constant fear and we had to evolve one sex to be strong defenders and leaders (with it coded in our psychology of wanting to do that, if there is something bad happening today do a bunch of women rush in to take action or do men?) and that made cold calculated decisions free from strong emotions (which can be taken advantage of by enemies), and the other to be fixated with the community, being social, group harmony, the tribe and home.

In our current enlightened time of fairness and equality, it is proven that what we are doing really does not work at all because birth rates are nosediving (which is leading to forced mass immigration from the 3rd world, ironically the people who are propping up western nations are from cultures that do not believe in equality and other liberal ideology). Some tough decisions are going to be needed in the future, or we won't be around to worry about equality and fairness. The people we are bringing in will be the inheritors of our empires.

If what we are currently doing leads to population collapse, it's going to fail the test of time and cultures that don't do that will replace us when we go the way of the dinosaurs. This stuff is very simple, survival isn't about fairness. You either do what needs to be done, or you die out and others take your place.

Most of the problems in the world are caused by men. The collapse of the human race will likely be because of men.

Lower birth rate has absolutely nothing to do with fairness and equality policy lol. All of the lowest birth rate regions aren't western.....




According to your logic Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Ukraine, Macau and Hong Kong has better fairness and equality than western countries!

Or....your logic is false. Low birth rate is affected by other factors, not equality policy at all.

The reasons for any kind of large dip in birth rates in western countries are likely to do with the growing cost of living (thanks to greedy companies and world leaders - pretty much all of which are men) and also the fear of the future and bringing up kids in a world where the population is trying to kill each other and the planet we live on.

Yes because modern men are the creators of this progressive equality ideology with no end in the first place (women didn't do any of this, men enabled all of it), and the reason for that is two massive world wars created evolutionary pressure that killed off the majority of sensible men and a sea of soy remained (especially in Europe, it was less catastrophic in the US).

Western liberal culture won't last, it's even dying at breakneck speed after a few decades of adoption because it is utterly unsustainable. There is no arguing against that, it is blatantly obvious what we are doing does not work on a foundational level and population collapse is in effect. If not for mass immigration from 3rd world patriarchal cultures every western country would have fallen by now, our economies would have collapsed.

I would say there is a pretty strong relation between low birthrate and work/living stress. I know more than a couple of East Asian women who married at age 33-36, wanted to have kids but failed pregnancy due to infertility issues. Spending large amount of life time in work could lead to people marry late and suffer from infertility due to work stress and age.

If you are married at age 20 you are far less likely to suffer from infertility issues than someone work 10+ hr a day from age 20-36 then decided to have kids and family at that time. I believe that's how the entire east Asia region ended up suffering from low birthrate even more than western regions. Too much work in life and marry too late.

(Ukraine's low birth rate is probably an exception here due to war)

UK's birth rate per woman is like 1.57+ btw, so it's not nearly as bad. South Korea pretty much declared national emergency for birth rate issues.

What, who and why were the world wars started? Why did Putin invade Ukraine? Not for progressive reasons that's for sure.

The immigration thing is nonsense too. We have imported slaves for how many centuries? At least now we pay the people coming to our countries for the work they do.

Women have a short amount of time to have children, men can have children when they are 90 so it doesn't matter what they do (they can jerk off and play vidya all day and still do their primary role to society as an old man). Even at 30, women are more prone to having children with birth defects, let alone higher.

If you have a culture that promotes women to to see a career as the goal of their entire life (especially 18>30), and demonizing motherhood then you're going to destroy your countries.

Women should be supported 18>30 and free to do whatever they want, after that they can go all in on a career if they want. Treating women like men is really damn stupid and celebrating when colleges and universities are now majority women is clowny.

I always find it funny to listen to my 35-40 year old female colleagues saying "when I have a child someday..".

Putin has decimated Ukraine's young male population.

This isn't true. There is degradation of children born to older men past a certain age. I have seen it firsthand and there is science to support it.

Also, just so we can all be consistant, Candy Crush, Mahjongg, and games of that ilk will heretofore be referred to as "Games for Dames."

This is to balance out the snarky "bro games" that is apparently required by some on this thread for describing strategy games.

Did you get offended by the term bro games or something? Why! I thought it's a pretty manly term that promotes masculinity!

(I wasn't trolling nor say "masculinity" in a negative way btw. I thought masculinity or manly is a positive trait, don't know why it's offensive.)

Awww, ickle boy is getting his feelings hurt because someone is categorizing the games they play in a way they don't like. It's ok ickle snowflake.

Thanks for being an example of a fragile man.

The most hilarious thing is that Mahjong is a game of strategy, far more strategy than employed in games like CoD. What an embarrassment.

Mahjong isn't even a "female game" in Chinese culture. Chinese plays Mahjong as a competitive social activity like westerners play chess. Sometimes people play and gamble with it during Chinese new year when family members gather.

From this aspect, it has competitive elements in it and kinda manly in a way. Many good Mahjong players are men.

Mahjong being associate with mostly female activity is a western thing.