As has been mentioned before, I’m no puritan when it comes to sex in my entertainment. I love me a good chain mail bikini, and I think it’s possible to love Bayonetta as much as one loves Batgirl’s new outfit. I’m a sex-positive lefty that’s perfectly happy with my entertainment containing a little jiggle factor, and I’ll fearlessly add it to games I work on as well if I think it’s right for the audience.

And therein lies the rub. It’s quite one thing to say that its okay for a game with a Porky’s attitude towards sexuality combined with a Vallejo sensibility towards what women should look like. It’s quite another to visual realize that it seems to many women that that’s the only thing that’s available on the shelves. It’s not just games – witness the sudden realization one father had when he took his daughter to the comic book store.

Geekdom is shifting, and it’s shifting fast. Two years ago, DC Comics was mocking and stumbling over issues of diversity in their lineup at the time that the Hawkeye Initiative was picking up steam. Marvel, on the other hand, has been crushing it, earning platitudes for its Muslim Ms. Marvel, its black alt-universe spiderman, its black Captain America, and most recently Thor’s recent gender-bending exercise. Some not-very-observant observers called all this the ‘ruin of a cherished art form’. Meanwhile, people who actually know the space observe that Marvel is absolutely crushing it on all fronts right now, including the popularity of the aforementioned experiments, and now DC feels compelled to follow suit.

Why? It’s not because these companies suddenly became altruistic and decided to pursue world peace and an end to the patriarchy. No, it’s because of money. Larger markets means more books and more movie tickets sold. Marvel is currently reaching for markets that have been ignored for years. If DC doesn’t wake up, Marvel could own these spaces for a nerd generation to come.

The truth of the matter is that the champions of diversity are going to win for one simple reason – money. As technology advances, the cost of creating the content for your average video game is simply going to keep going up, faster than the size of the audience that will buy that game. It’s not just games – Joss Whedon doesn’t get $220 Million to make the Avengers unless he can figure out how to put women and children butts in those seats as well.

On the flip side, more women are playing games than ever before. And yes, many of these women are playing facebook and mobile games, but what is capturing the eye of many game executives and designers is that that is shifting as well – MMO audiences used to be predominantly male, whereas now that split is narrowing, and at least one major single player hardcore geek genre – the RPG – reportedly at parity tipping towards the ladies. Yes, console ownership still slants heavily male, and many genres still are dominated by men – League of Legends, for example, is 90% male. However, progress in other genres has raised eyebrows and questions – could a MOBA with a less threatening environment and less revealing character art carve off its own niche?

So it’s not only about fear of rising budgets – although reducing risk has a lot to do with it. Just from the greed side alone, potentially doubling your audience (or greater, once you factor in reaching for other marginalized groups!) starts to turn into big rewards. And if you can reach that audience without making decisions that trample over your core artistic vision or alienating your existing baked in userbase, why wouldn’t you?

None of this is to say that the best old stuff is going away any time soon. There is at the movies, always room for Porky’s, not to mention all the films by Tarantino– and thank God for that! Similarly, the stockholders of Take Two, EA and Activision aren’t going to be happy if GTA, Madden and Call of Duty all suddenly turn into interactive versions of the Notebook. But if we can get a wider breadth of variety out of the rest of the games, and also increase the visibility of those games in marketing and the media, then perhaps we can actually broaden gaming’s reach even more, invent some new game genres, and actually add some stability to what is a very turbulent place to work.