Few Makers of Video Games Are Playing to Women
Although the market for video games is rapidly expanding into new niches, gaming companies have yet to capture the attention and the enormous spending power of adult women.
One of the themes of the fourth annual Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, which opens Thursday in Atlanta, is sure to be the video game market’s movement away from its dependence on teenage boys and toward a wider audience.
The popularity of sub-$1,000 PCs has prompted developers to attempt to appeal to nontraditional players by creating games such as WizardWorks’ smash hit “Deer Hunter” and numerous titles for younger girls.
Even though the time is ripe to broaden the $5.1-billion video game software market, few companies are making an effort to design games that appeal to women or to aggressively target women through advertising.
“The market is there, the desire of women is there, but today’s titles don’t appeal to them,” said Walter Miao, a senior vice president at New York-based market research firm Access Media International.
Research shows women prefer puzzle games, such as “Tetris” or “Myst,” and find violent video games boring. But video game firms say designing and marketing games strictly for women isn’t cost-effective.
“We don’t like to talk about gender as much as we like to talk about genre, like racing, sports, adventure, fighting and puzzle games,” said Lee McEnany Caraher, vice president of communications at Sega. “Depending on the person, they will seek the game that’s good for them.”
This approach illustrates how the market for women’s games is unlikely to break open without a strong woman-oriented title, analysts say.
“It’s going to require the same type of success that the girls’ market required,” said Seema Williams, an analyst for Cambridge, Mass.-based market research firm Forrester Research. “When Mattel introduced the ‘Barbie Fashion Designer’ two years ago, it rocketed into the top 10. One myth that game cracked was that girls will not play on their PCs.”
After that, the girls’ game market took off, more than doubling in sales from $26 million in 1996 to $64 million last year. Girls’ games are expected to generate about $135 million in sales this year. A number of companies that missed the first rush to cash in are set to debut titles at E3.
To reach women, video game companies must develop content that will appeal to women without playing into stereotypes. Then they must figure out how to market to women.
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Companies currently spend most of their marketing dollars trying to reach hard-core gamers--traditionally men--on the theory that “if you don’t get the 16-to-17-year-old male, you won’t get the rest of the market,” Caraher said.
Men make up about 89% of the console market, according to Port Washington, N.Y.-based NPD Group. And most gaming magazine subscribers are men--about 94% of 3,500 respondents to a recent online survey by Imagine Media, publisher of a slate of game magazines, were men.
Executives had hoped to attract more women through online gaming, an area in which overall returns have been disappointing. But even in the online gaming arena, only 25% of the players are women.
The industry is making some inroads, though. About 43% of all PC video game players are women, and a similar number play Nintendo’s Game Boy. Women are attracted to PC games, experts say, because the PC can run sophisticated puzzle games, as opposed to console hardware technology, which is designed to support action and fighting titles.
Several firms have also taken tentative steps to court women. Leading software maker Electronic Arts, known for its strong lineup of sports titles, has released several games it hopes will appeal to women.
“Just this year, we tiptoed into women’s sports,” said Bing Gordon, executive vice president and chief creative officer at the San Mateo, Calif.-based company, which said it does not track percentage of sales by gender. “We’re continuing to explore on that front with different sports that might have more of a 50-50 viewership appeal.”
Nintendo is also searching for ways to reach women.
“There is more that can be done,” said Perrin Kaplan, director of corporate communications for Nintendo. “It’s not so much the kinds of games that are being made, but it’s where companies choose to spend their marketing dollars.”
Tapping into a successful method used to create products that appeal to girls, some firms are trying to write strong female characters into their games. There’s a Catch-22 in that strategy, however, because firms must first design a character that appeals to their core audience--notably men.
Eidos Interactive says the leading character in its immensely successful “Tomb Raider” series--bombshell Lara Croft--interests both men and women. About 30% of “Tomb Raider’s” sales have been to women, said Eidos President Keith Boesky.
“Not only is Croft not a degrading image of a woman, she is a strong female character who solves her own problems and addresses her own issues,” Boesky said. “She doesn’t rely on men.”
The worldwide appeal of Croft showed that a strong woman could lead a game, and it prompted a rash of leading ladies, Boesky said. (In 1992, only 8 of 100 games featured women at all.)
Most representations of women in video games today are a variation on Croft, with her enormous chest and revealing clothing. A “Massive Game Girl Pictorial” in the June issue of Ultra Gameplayers magazine features many of them, such as “Virtua Fighter’s” Sarah Bryant and “Deathtrap Dungeon’s” Red Lotus--all clad in skimpy swimsuits that leave little to the imagination.
“We have to remember that Lara Croft was designed and written by and planned and conceived by a guy and written for guys,” said Roberta Williams, a video game designer who is currently working on “King’s Quest: The Mask of Eternity” for Sierra On-Line. “So Lara Croft is not the kind of female that most female players would want to play--to me, she’s a guy in drag.”
But industry watchers say Croft has helped the company attract more women.
“I have talked to other female gamers who were brought into gaming by ‘Tomb Raider,’ ” said Francesca Reyes, news and previews editor for Game Buyer magazine. “But that could be because there’s a female in the lead role or because the game is really good.”
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Some firms are content to wait for girl gamers to grow older, in hopes their buying habits will last a lifetime. Others are counting on titles with compelling story lines to attract a wider female audience.
“More women and girls bought our game than traditionally buy anything for the Sony PlayStation,” said Sherry McKenna, CEO of San Luis Obispo-based Oddworld Inhabitants, whose debut title, “Abe’s Oddysee,” was popular with both sexes. “What we set out to do is to get you to care about our characters. That’s never been done in a video game.”
Hoping to piggyback on Mattel’s success with its Barbie software, some firms are publishing video games that rely on fashion trends. SegaSoft Networks released “Cosmopolitan Virtual Makeover” last fall. The title, widely considered to be a trial balloon for women’s games, has sold about 300,000 units, prompting SegaSoft to form an entire division to write follow-up games, such as “Cosmo Virtual Makeover Style Pack One,” released in January, and “Style Pack Two,” due this month. Company executives said it wasn’t easy promoting a women’s title but that they’re glad they took the risk.
“Why would you want to be one of many companies going after the same market that everyone else is going after?” said Lori Von Rueden, director of marketing for SegaSoft. “Right now we’re in the enviable position of having no competition.”
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Jennifer Oldham can be reached via e-mail at jennifer.oldham@latimes.com.
