Recent research, they tell us, finds that female PC gamers outnumber males. This research is echoing a similar report from the ESA (Entertainment Software Association) claiming that half of the game players are women. Well… good news, everyone! I guess.

But at the same time we see the same video game industry at the center of the #GamerGate heated debate, which covers everything from journalistic ethics to sexism and women representation to an all our culture war between gamers and moral guardians.

One of the points being brought up a lot is that games don’t properly represent the large female audience right now. And while I never researched it so I don’t know to what extent, it’s probably still true that female game protagonists are largely under-represented compared to the real population distribution.

But why is that?

Well, one of the not-so-hidden secrets is that the ESA itself, being the association that promotes video game culture in the United States, is trying to promote video games as an activity for everyone. It’s therefore in their best interest to be as inclusive as possible about their demographics.

But if you look at the ESA member companies in the same report, you will notice that these are the game companies “accused” for misrepresentation of female characters in video games. Considering the above, don’t they want to sell more copies of their games by introducing playable female characters?

The answer is in the numbers: when counting “game players” for their research paper, they treat everyone who plays games — so each person has “a single vote”. But when doing actual business and putting millions behind developing games, they don’t treat you as males or females. Just numbers.

Show me the money

For game publishers you are merely a walking wallet, and that’s the harsh truth of every business dealing with the bottom line. If you can’t sustain a business in the long run, everything else you try to do doesn’t really matter.

Look inside your wallet … do you see a penis sticking out? How about your credit card, is there a pair of tits dangling out of it? Sex simply doesn’t matter, and coming this Christmas Gaben will still rape your steam wallet without regards to its sexual preferences.

The actual question is not how many female and male gamer there are, but rather how much female and male gamers spend on games

And this is one hell of a question, because studios have to pay salaries and public companies have to report to their shareholders. If you made it into the ESA “game players” statistics because you occasionally play minesweeper on your Windows 95 PC… well, good for you. But you are probably not their target audience.

This puts a whole new perspective not only on the validity of the research, but on the entire blitz of “gamers are dead” articles we’ve seen this summer that helped spark the #GamerGate movement.

Adore the core

Putting aside the gender game for a moment, let’s talk numbers and dollar value:

Take the “light” console gamer, the type who only buys the annual iteration of Madden or FIFA or Call of Duty so they can play online with their friends. This type of gamer will still spend 60$ every year for the annual game iteration. Top that with 60$ of Live Gold membership, and buying the DLC because everyone else is buying it — and you are easily talking close to 150$ a year. And that’s just one game (and excluding the price of the console)

Now think about the huge crowd of casual gamers playing Farmville, or Angry Birds or Candy Crash. Of course there are hundreds of millions of them, but how many are actually paying more than a single cent for the experience? And what is the average payout from each paying customer?

When you have the answer for that, you can consider the enormous difference. How many casual players do you need to hook in order to have a combined income that equals to just one console gamer paying 150$ a year? 10? 100? 1,000? More? How many advertising dollars will you have to spend to acquire all these players?

And this is the real story of the core audience: The hardcore gamers will spend way more than a mere 150$ annually on their hobby because they play more than one game. And to complement the games they will also invest in hardware and peripheral purchases or additional merchandise that will net the industry even more money.

These are luxury customers that the industry wishes to preserve. They are good customers because they are paying top dollar, some are enthusiastic to the level of pre-ordering the games which helps offsetting costs, and they are mostly predictable: make a good game and they will likely buy it.

Compare and contrast with the slippery casual gamer DNA which very few companies managed to crack, and even these companies didn’t manage to hold on the saddle for long. Nintendo admitted it very recently.

Let’s talk about sex

But none of what I said proves there is any difference between male and female gamers, right? It’s entirely possible that there are just as many female core gamers as males.

So as an experiment, let’s take this claim as a fact and assume there is an equal male-female split in the core gamers audience (including an equal split in $ spending). Now, bringing up the other assumption that there are less female protagonists in video games, we can come to one of two possible conclusions:

Female gamers don’t really care that much about representation. They will buy games with male/female protagonists based on how good they perceive them to be, and not on how “represented” they feel. Female gamers do care about representation. They will therefore incline towards buying the few games that allow them to play as a female protagonist.

If #1 is correct, then there is obviously no financial incentive to focus on games with female protagonists. Big publishers are conservative and they don’t want to take any risks here, since female gamers seem to be ok with their current games.

But if #2 is correct and gender representation is an important factor, then this should show up in actual game sales. If only 1 in 10 games has a female lead, we expect these games to sell much better (perhaps even 10 times as much) than their male-lead counterparts. After all, the female audience has less options to spend their money on but a similar sum of money to spend.

But eventually Tomb Raider didn’t sell 10 times better than Uncharted. Mirror’s Edge didn’t sell 10 times better than Dishonored. And Perfect Dark definitely didn’t sell 10 times better than GoldenEye.

The numbers simply don’t add up. Representation might be a somewhat important for female gamers, but either it’s not important enough or there aren’t that many female gamers willing to spend 60$ on these games in the first place.

Eppur si muove

You can stomp your feet very hard saying that it isn’t so, or you can try to force inject your ideologies and force cultural disruption. But when the culture is so well established you are very likely to receive huge amounts of backlash. Welcome to #GamerGate everyone!

Publishers will introduce more varied characters only if they see that the benefits of doing that are at least countering the potential risk. You might wish to blame this fact on a small/large population of male gamers being assholes who don’t wish to play as a female protagonists [requires citation], but the only way to combat this is by spending more money than them on the games you like and make you fill represented.

After all, how many of you who wish to see more female characters in games went out and bought Assassin’s Creed Liberation, the only game in the series to introduce a female protagonist? If you didn’t do that and now Ubisoft decides that another female protagonist is a bit too risky (because they noticed that game didn’t meet sales expectations), you have only yourself to blame.

Yay Capitalism!

So that’s game industry 101 for you. But it’s really not that different from any other business: the core of enthusiastic audience is usually smaller, but they are willing to pay much more and are therefore treated as premium customers.

Think about the hair styling industry for a moment: about half of the people taking a haircut are men. About half the people washing their hair are men. So why are the majority of commercials targeted at women? Why are they being catered to much more? Why are there better suited and more elegant hairstyle salons exclusively for women? Why is there simply zero image results of males when googling “hair style”?

Is it because men are being oppressed? Misrepresented? No. The answer is that simple: when men will be willing to pay 100$ and upwards for a haircut, or 50$ for cosmetic hair serum, this industry will cater to them.

The industry, any industry, doesn’t care for your gender. Nor do they care if your bank notes show up with an image of Queen Elizabeth or Benjamin Franklin. They only care about these notes going from inside your wallet into their own pockets.

Do that and they will listen to you. The customer is always right after all.