Games Industry Failing Women
Via Spong
EA’s chief operating officer for EA's worldwide studios, David Gardner, claimed that the videogame industry is continuing to fail women, at a speech given in Edinburgh yesterday.
Gardner told the assembled audience up in Scotland: "We have all been talking about this for a long, long time… We are only reaching a small proportion - not only geographically but also genetically.”
He stressed that the industry needs to "create some mega hits in the girl space."
Interestingly enough, what with yesterday's news that Sony is soon to be introducing a new pink PS2 and PSP, Gardner claimed that women don’t just want ‘pink’ games, noting that: "They are not trying to play girly games where Paris Hilton and Britney Spears go shopping and put make-up on. Those kind of things have not been that successful."
Instead, as an example of the type of game that women do want he held up the example of EA’s 40 million selling mega-buster The Sims, with over 70% of Sims players being women under 25.
"The Sims is really a game about relationships - and that's what girls want - they want relationships, they want to be able to chat." Gardner went on to outline his vision for developing these “mega hits in the girl space” he has in mind, which is simply for more companies to invest in better creative teams run by women.
“Four of our 11 studios around the world are run by women. That's an important start,” he declared.
So what’s driving Gardner’s concern with making better games to appeal to women? A feminist concern for equality? Not likely. No, it’s purely that old bottom-line. He claims that if EA were to solve this problem then they could add a billion dollars to sales.
Of course, Gardner isn't the first human to realise selling games to people with ovaries is a good idea, and there was a certain amount of awkward muttering of Nintendo's recent triumphs in the oestrogen arena, a factor the EA exec seemingly overlooked.
Indeed, Nintendo's recent financial positionings, aimed squarely at spiking investor confidence following a lengthy R&D phase and preceding a costly production and marketing drive, have been thickly applying the assertion that Nintendo has already cracked selling videogames to women.
Although most analysts find Nintendo's claims sit somewhere in between the over-egged and the slightly disingenuous, the fact stands that Nintendogs, Brain Training, Animal Crossing and Tetris have all found a welcome home in the handbags of women, especially in Japan.
In SPOnG's opinion, a good marketing push in women's consumer/lifesytle magazines from Just 17 through to Vogue in the US and Europe in the coming months could well successfully position a DS Lite equipped with Opera browsing software as the must have handbag gizmo this winter season, transcending most traditional age and income-bracket barriers.
