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Most Switch Owners Are Women, Gamers React Poorly
Interesting title. As if "Women" and "Gamers" were two distinct groups.
Indeed, I’m assuming it wasn’t the female gamers that reacted badly…
Capital G Gamers doesn't just mean people who play games, it means people who've built their whole identity around being weird little exclusionary creeps about gaming
Valid point, but even then, the two groups overlap.
The title seems to suggest that all Gamers were male. The article mostly talks about how that is not the case. It refers to these vocal gamers as 'some annoying dudes' within the text. Evidently, only some Gamers reacted poorly, but omitting the "some" makes for a more clickbaity=better headline.
The irony is, this headline strengthens the very stereotype the article aims to combat.
My girlfriend has been literally using my PS5 more than me since I got it, gamer girls do exist and we should cherish them, not alienate them
I'm a 38-year-old woman who has been playing games since she was five years old. The myth that women don't play and enjoy games is a long-running one.
I've been playing games on computers since 1977, at that time non-video games. Although I did play Pong on tabletop box (a TV screen embedded in a table, with knobs on the table top) in a hotel, sometime before that, probably around 1975 or so.
I read some digital market reports a few years back, which showed that something like 98% of all people between 13-18 were gaming. Obviously mostly casual games, but nevertheless paying consumers of games. More female than male by a close margin.
When I discussed it on another gaming forum they were really quick to dismiss casual games altogether, despite it being the very largest group. There's probably still a male majority in desktop first person shooters, which seemed to be the only "correct" gamers according to he kind of people following that kind of forum. Anyway, if I were to program a game I surely wouldn't aim at the "stereotypical" gamer. They're a minority with very high demands and very expensive gear. The whole stereotype is gatekept to the point where I don't want to participate neither as a gamer or as developer.
Don't quote me on this bc I do not remember the source but I remember reading somewhere that if you included the whole gaming market, women were a clear majority because of mobile but many many mobile gamers did not self-identify as gamers which I think probably skews other surveys/studies targeted at "gamers"
I have to wonder if some of it comes from the idea that casual games are generally a different audience than "core" games. Like someone playing candy crush on their phone is counted as someone who plays games, but I wouldn't lump them in with the kinda person that at least casually follows the industry and picks up a few new games for their PS5 every year or the person that is super active in the indie scene.
Toxicity towards girls and women in gaming is a real problem, but this article doesn't really show that as it's just talking about random people from Twitter It's definitely nice so many women feel free to own consoles nowadays
basically just elaborating on this twitter thread.
And because Kotaku decided to play a >1min video ad while i was trying to read:
tl;dr:
According to Circana's PlayerPulse:
47% of console video game players are female (+1% vs YA)
50% of PC video game players are female (+1% vs YA)
54% of mobile video game players are female (+1% vs YA)
41% of PS5s in the US are female owned
45% of Xbox Series consoles are female owned
52% of Swich consoles are female owned
50% of gaming PCs are female owned
That doesn't really seem right to me, at least in the US. Most female gamers I know are either married (so any consoles would be joint owned) or play mobile games almost exclusively. Some play on PC, and very few play on any kind of console without being married. Or maybe they just don't talk about it like men do.
If that's accurate, I think it's awesome! I'm more interested in methodology though. I'd love for this to be true since it means we've finally destroyed the stigma against women playing video games.
The methodology is discussed in the article.
Here is a tweet embedded in the article that explains how the data was collected.
While reflecting on our personal experience is useful it is important to acknowledge that our experiences are anecdotal and do not necessarily demonstrate truth.
I am a woman person and I have TWO switches. This is a source of consternation for some reason?
Noooo they made the switch Political !!
Why are people so stuck in the 1950s?
Glad to have woman playing. To paraphrase Iwata (Nintendo), gaming should be fun for everyone
Edit: "women" because I have butter fingers
The 1980's for computes, but yeah very much outdated and it's past time that we accept a good game is appealing to everyone and it doesn't need to be pink and simple for a women to want to play it
My girlfriend has ~800 hours in Lost Ark and ~500 hours in Guild Wars 2.
She always nags me about not finding her new games. I am glad we are compatible in more than one thing.
Try No Man's Sky, it brought countless fun hours to my SO and I. Same for Satisfactory.
I am glad this trend is becoming better understood. A more diverse audience means more diverse stories being told, and while another MCU or Street Fighter is a perfectly good game to release a game targeting that more diverse audience will give more options for me. I typically play games like Risk of Rain, Skyrim, Creeper World, and so on, but I have also lost many hours to Viva Piñata, so I would love to see some more diversity in the games on offer.
You do realize women like fighting games and the MCU, right?
That's the whole point of this statistic: the current gaming market is already palatable to everybody, unlike what your statement seem to misunderstand.
Eh, just because lots of women are playing games doesn't mean they're catered to women.
Don't get me wrong, the industry's come a long way from every female character having 28DD's and videogame trailers being all about stoic badasses and explosions. I think the rise of indie games has been great for that. But there's an undeniable male-coded streak that still exists in marketing and in the industry, especially at the AAA level, and there's progress we can still make there.
Bold of you to assume that a certain type of 'gamer' sees stories being more diverse as a positive 😩
I have always found it bizarre that some people find the option of a story they don't like threatening. I mean, go to a library, there are whole sections about gardening, I have black thumbs, nothing could interest me less, but it being there doesn't hurt me, and if I changed my mind there it is. Everyone wins in my opinion.
Clearly the data is wrong. Switches Jane, who owns three hundred million switches, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
I... have to admit, other than Switch I'd have estimated somewhere around 20% to be honest.
But I like to be wrong here, cool that it's not that divided!
And I'm not sure it's a good sign that I didn't expect this.
Maybe Men are more vocal (possibly because women are less so, because of bad treatment), or maybe I'm just not as attentive...
Maybe Men are more vocal (possibly because women are less so, because of bad treatment), or maybe I’m just not as attentive…
it's almost certain some of this disconnect is women just not participating in traditional gaming communities because they have to deal with dipshits constantly, yeah. i don't know if i'd characterize all of gaming as unusually misogynistic, but it's still probably really easy to find casual misogyny even in the best moderated gaming spaces--and a lot of gaming spaces aren't that well moderated either
There's also the fact that most people assume everyone else is a guy online, even if the users says otherwise. Given the misogyny you were mentioning I think a lot of the women who do stock around in gamer communities tend to not correct that assumption.
Yeah, I'm a woman in my thirties and I've played (on PC and console!) since I was five years old... learned a very, very long time ago that most people online would assume I was male and that it is often prudent not to correct them. So I don't. Twenty years of conditioning telling me to keep my head down. Now that I think about it, that's pretty sad.
I hope young girls nowadays feel more comfortable being open about their interests. Maybe I should be more open myself; I can take the hits if it makes things even a little bit easier for them.
Right. I'm a woman who as been gaming since I was about 7 years old. I have learned several strategies to make sure that I don't draw attention to that fact. It's always better if whoever I'm playing with assumes that I'm a dude.
This just in, “gamers” react shitty to something.
But "gamers" is evidently the wrong word, it should be "men". The whole point is that there are a ton of female gamers, and then they equate gamers with men in the title 🤷
You are 100 percent correct on that.
Thanks for the correction.
That is the most Onion headline I ever seen for real news. Kotaku? Yeah, the clickbait makes sense.
I remember when they took a group photo of all the people involved with the racing games at Codemasters. Around 600 of us... someone commented, "who are all these people?". Well, programmers (AI/Phyisic/Audio/etc), Artists, Sound Engineers, Producers, HR...
And there were women as well. Yes, that's right, women develop games as well. There's one of my team.
Among my personal friends, probably the same ratio of men and women are into Souls games. So like… yeah, women play games. And not just “lady-friendly” fare. As a non-woman, I freaking love Animal Crossing; meanwhile my wife has beaten most of the Souls games and I’ve given up on all of them. Anecdotal, but like… gamers like gaming, and I feel like these days trying to say anything about game preference and gender is just not really helpful.
I remember seeing this article https://www.pcgamer.com/former-sims-lead-says-men-would-lie-about-how-they-played-during-focus-groups-actually-what-you-did-is-you-redecorated-that-bathroom/ and thinking it was funny how both men and women lie/hide stuff about gaming because of gender norms
Woman like Pokemon as much as dudes. Also Nintendo's awful online experience is a plus for woman that don't want to be exposed to weird online dudes.
If candy crush counts, my mom is more of a gamer than me
Of course gamer bros are salty about this!
I would not trust Kotaku.
Two Words: Animal Crossing
Not just that but the Switch has a lot of lovely indie games that are popular among women (Gris, Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, Spiritfarer, Cult of the Lamb). Also Hades, but everyone likes Hades.
Really? People are still acting like this? I remember back in the early 2000s when people were giving me crap for being a female gamer. The sad part is that I have been gaming probably before a lot of these new people complaining about female gamers have been born. I started back in the day with the Super NES. I also have a gaming PC, a Switch, and a Steam Deck. I also have various other consoles.
That anyone ever acted like that is so insane to me, it doesn't even feel like it happened on the same planet. Among my middle/high school circle of friends through the 00's, not a single one of us would have ever given shit to anyone, male or female, for playing video games. To us, every new gamer we met was a potential new friend who spoke our favorite language. Then we graduate, go out into the world, look around on the internet, and hear stories that there exist complete fuckwads on this green earth trying to keep girls out of gaming?? Like... what??
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this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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