Google is starting a new initiative to help bring more female game developers into the industry and to increase female gaming demographics. Their plan to acculturate gendered demographics into the mobile gaming space begins with their new campaign called “Change The Game”.

They released a minute and a half trailer talking about female diversity, lesbianism, motherhood, and gaming.

Google Play product marketing manager, Mathilde Cohen, told GamesIndustry.biz that the surveys they conducted showed that male gamers still consider themselves to be hardcore gamers, where-as women are less likely to do so even though more women find themselves engaged with mobile gaming than men, saying…

“The last part of our hypothesis is there’s underrepresentation within the industry,” […] “It’s not a surprise today that 27.8% of the games industry is either female or transgender. A minority of the industry is female, and we do believe that has an impact on the content and the storylines created.”

According to the survey, more men played more mobile genres – three or more – while women only stuck to one or two genres. This fits in line with DeltaDNA’s survey, which revealed that women are more inclined toward puzzle and social games as opposed to action and sports games.

The data also revealed only 27% of women were likely to talk about video games with their friends, while 44% of men were inclined to talk about games with their friends. Only 29% of women self-identified as a “gamer” while 57% of men considered themselves as a “gamer”.

More than 60% of women also thought that less than a third of mobile games are made for women.

Google will be force-promoting diversity in games, and “celebrating” female players as part of their “Change The Game” campaign.

One of the ways that Google will be doing that is promoting games that feature “strong female characters”, and they’re also creating a website to help further survey and promote female diversity in gaming.

We’ve always known that females had an affinity for mobile games, much more-so than the average male, but there’s no barrier to entry to making and selling mobile games other than Apple and Google. In other words: no one is stopping female start-ups from making the games females want to play, other than the gatekeepers that are Apple and Google.

More than anything, it requires a very necessary set of questions to be asked:

1) If women feel there aren’t enough games representing them on the mobile space, why aren’t they making the games they want to play?

2) If there is no barrier to entry to make a mobile game – and women simply aren’t showing an organic interest to make games – then why is it necessary to force women into the field if they they aren’t showing organic interest?

Google appears to be trying to manufacture an equation to create a solution for a market problem that otherwise wouldn’t exist.