Quantic Foundry

I'm not entirely sure why the points raised in the memo are rebutted without providing evidence to other papers proving the contrary point.

If the papers proving that biologically there's an interest difference between the genders are not enough then we could apply some data science.

Let's assume that nothing can force the gaming interests of women and men such as higher pay or availability (this
could be debatable in the past). There are studies like these made on over 250000 gamers which show clear interest differences between the two genres:
http://quanticfoundry.com/2016/12/15/primary-motivations/
http://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/
The gaming field (and marketing in general) is full of models used very successfully when deciding on a company/business strategy.

Google with their huge data analysis powerhouse could end this debate swiftly in their favor but I fear that either their data proves the writer's points and they're acting hypocritically now or they are avoiding adding fuel to the emotional fire (from a scientific point, Google data would be pure gold for years to come) by not releasing anything (pro or con).

I think you’re wrong on both counts.
I know plenty of female targeted comics in Belgium and France.

And half of gamers are women. Women just like to play different games than men. Casual games that are dismissed as ‘real games’ by many. But even before smartphones casual games were a billion dollar industry.

There’s a study [1] that spells out which game genres are dominated by women. They surveyed 270,000 gamers about their favorite game titles. According to this study, women make up about 70% of match 3 and family/farm simulation games’ audiences. About half of casual puzzle and atmospheric exploration games are played by women, too. The gender ratio plummets when we get to first-person shooters, tactical shooters and racing games. At the bottom of the chart, a mere 2% of sports game-players are women

[1] https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/

If there would be no data point below/above 20/85, then it might be warranted to truncate it, but that's clearly not the case, in fact, by definition, there is 20% and 15% of the data respectively.

The bars starting from the median (50th percentile) are also a pretty meaningless visual indicator. E.g. the bars for competition visually indicate that men would be twice as competitive, but in the graph without the bar and including the 0th/100th percentile the difference is much less pronounced:

https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/hardcore_comparison-650x326.png

https://i.imgur.com/P9M7AnR.png

I find that especially damning as lots of these gamers are probably not familiar with statistics, so they might indeed draw extreme conclusions from these graphs merely due to the way it is represented.

New candidate for Most Confusing Chart of 2018 right here folks:

https://quanticfoundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/overall_casual_hardcore.png

Even the explanation doesn't help:

> In this chart below, the y-axis is showing the percentile rank of each motivation. That 50th-%tile line represents the average among the 350,000+ gamers who have completed the Gamer Motivation Profile. So for example, the 74th-%tile in Competition among Hardcore gamers means that the average Hardcore gamer scores higher on Competition than 74% of the gamers in the full data set.

I genuinely don't think there's anything useful that can be said here at all without knowing what fraction of gamers make up the different catagories. Beyond that, all we can say for sure is that "hardcore" gamers like gaming more. Ugh.

The ESA, which covers only the US ages 18+: 53% male, 68% white, 87% straight, median age 37. https://www.theesa.com/resources/essential-facts-about-the-us-video-game-industry/2026-data/

A female share of around 40-48% has held steady in this report since around 2007.

Quantic Foundry's research largely backs that women prefer more casual-genre games like match 3, with a mobile bent that wouldn't show up in Steam data: https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/

But they also show a heavy preference for third-person MMOs that are also less likely to show up in Steam data: https://quanticfoundry.com/2023/01/27/perspective/

Nice polemic piece. Only goes to show that people don't know what huge variety of game experiences there are out there.

And also, we need to move away from the idea that some games or genres are objectively better or more interesting than others. It's all relative to the audience - some people have a stronger reaction to some experiences than to others, and will seek out different things.

Nick Yee has been doing excellent, data driven research on the interaction between player preferences, game types, and personality types - there's some intro material from his gdc talk on their web site: http://quanticfoundry.com/gdc/