A cheap and easy way for Bioware to attract new customers

What about doing all?

In my opinion picking a gender is a heavy reason to play a game. Tell about the patches, hint DLC, tell of the opportunityes.

No consensus will be formed as, imo, selectable gender couldn't possibly be lower on my list of "things important in video games."

Maybe you should play female characters then.




(Don't want to pick a fight: people who already has the choice to play as their gender tend to forget that we female gamers usually experience our games trough male lenses - for example Witcher, GTA and Zelda just to mention a couple - and then a female protagonist starts to climb up in that "important list". But it is getting better now though. :-) )

It's possible that my assumption of NOT being able to play as a woman in games is because I come from an era where that was the case. Betrayal at Krondor was an RPG with 6 protagonists, all of them male. Gothic and Nox were games my husband played that had male protagonists. I played Fallout, NWN, and Might and Magic specifically because I could create a female character, and other games that allowed me to be female but made me be a specific class, usually a thief or mage type (Diablo and Sacred). I stopped playing games for a decade due to other commitments until I picked up DAO and have pretty much just bought Bioware titles since then, with a couple of detours through Diablo 3, Borderlands 2 and DOS. So if it is the case that all RPGs these days have a female option then maybe only those of us who are old enough to remember the early days don't assume we will have the option. In any event, all games could do better at advertising what their customization options are. It's interesting to me that many games don't talk about character customization even when they have it. I don't know anything about Dark Souls 3, but apparently one can be female in that game, yet there's no mention of it or of any customization options on Steam or Amazon. The first video on the Steam page has a retro faux-advertisement for the "movie" that talks about "what a man must do."

I never claimed that having a higher % of women buying the game alone caused DAI to be Bioware's most successful launch and I specifically said  that a cause and effect relationship between advertising the female option, disproportionate numbers of women buying the game and a record launch couldn't be proven. However, I do think that both of those things helped quite a bit. In the article on female gamers by genre, they had 18.5% of the 270k respondents identify as female. However, of the western RPGs, 48% (about half) of the people claiming to have played DAI were female as opposed to the average for ME3, TW3, FO4 and Skyrim, which was 26% (about a quarter). If 18% of a player base suddenly accounts for almost half of sales AND the launch is the most successful ever, the question arises how did that happen?

Let's arbitrarily decide that 10% of all gamers play RPGs. (Does anyone have real stats? I couldn't find any.) We know from the survey that usually a quarter of those are female, or 2.5% of all gamers are female RPG players and 7.5% are male RPG players. Suddenly, one game (DAI) sells half of their games to women AND has their most successful launch ever.

The possibilities for getting a 50:50 split:
1) Females bought the game at their normal rate of 2.5% but males decreased their buying so the proportion of females to males became about even, another 2.5%. This would lead to half as many sales overall (5% versus our expected 10% of the total playerbase buying RPGs). This definitely didn't happen.
2) Males bought at their normal rate of 7.5%, but females increased their buying 3X to make the proportion of males to females even at 7.5%. This would make overall sales 15% of the playerbase, which increased overall sales by half.) This seems fairly reasonable.
3) Both females and males increased their buying to let's say 10%, which means a third more men bought the game and four times (!) as many women as usual bought the game, giving 20% (or double) normal sales. This seems possible but optimistic and probably would have been bragged about specifically. "We doubled our sales projection!"
4) Both females and males maxed out at 18% (the highest we can go and still have a 50:50 split). Males increased buying by 2.4X and females increased buying by a whopping 7.2X, giving overall sales of 36%, or more than three and a half times normal. This seems wildly improbable, because ALL female gamers in the survey would have needed to buy the game, which I guarantee didn't happen, and EA definitely would have mentioned a stat like that in their investor call.

Remember, the overall population of female gamers in that survey is about 18%, so the number of male RPG players can't exceeed that and still have approximately equal numbers of males and females playing DAI. The number in fact must be lower than that in order for there to be record sales AND a 50:50 split.

Because the proportion of female to male gamers for DAI is almost 50:50 instead of 25:75 like usual, and because we know that DAI was reported to be the "most successful launch by Bioware," Something like 2 or 3 had to have happened, which means that women came out for the game in unprecedented numbers while men either held steady or increased modestly.

So why did unprecedented numbers of women turn out for DAI as opposed to the four other RPGs (ME3, TW3, FO4, Skyrim)?
It's not DAI's superior quality. The other games are all very good and many are arguably better than DAI.
I don't believe it to be the motivations "fantasy and completion" which are also present in the other games.

"Fantasy" in that context doesn't mean a fantasy setting (which would apply to Skyrim in any case) but "Gamers who score high on Fantasy want their gaming experiences to allow them to become someone else, somewhere else. They enjoy the sense of being immersed in an alter ego in a believable alternate world, and enjoy exploring a game world just for the sake of exploring it." (I took the survey to find out more about it.) That should apply to all of those games because they are RPGs. "Completion" means "Gamers with high Completion scores want to finish everything the game has to offer. They try to complete every mission, find every collectible, and discover every hidden location. For some players, this may mean completing every listed achievement or unlocking every possible character/move in a game." While this may be a motivator for many women (not me) this is not a discriminator someone would find out about a game prior to buying it. Bioware isn't going to advertise endless shard hunting and elfroot picking as a positive game feature, and all games have achievements.

Maybe it is a mystical combination of wonderful things that DAI has, but then how did record numbers of women find out about them? There are few enough of us that we're not talking to each other much, definitely not enough to triple sales, so word of mouth probably isn't it. And we're not hearing about them from men, who care about different things, otherwise all games would have a 50:50 split. Where are women hearing the information that makes them buy games? I'd say it's advertising. And what is different between the advertising of ME3 and DAI?

"Choose your gender, pick a class, and decide the Inquisitor's race."

Maybe it's the explicitly stated ability to be an elf that's drawing women. I can't say for sure that it isn't. But my money is on the first part. And it would be very cheap for Bioware to give it a try in all of their descriptions.