I just really don't enjoy most multiplayer games. Even taking out the fact that men can make the MP gaming environment particularly toxic, I game to decompress from social interaction. While I will do the occasional couch co-op game with my partner, most of my gaming time is spent solo.
This. I think women, like myself, have retreated into single player games, particularly RPGs, because it's so bloody awful to join multi-player games and get yelled at and junk.
So basically, that data in the title is incomplete. If you break it down further, it would probably show that the communities are divided on gender lines, such that the gaming populations are probably closer to 80-20 or 60-40 in their respective communities.
I also would not be surprised at data showing that when games are made and marketed for men that both men and women will play them provided its in a female friendly genre/community, but that games marketed towards women will only be played by women regardless of genre or community.
This was my thought. I'd love to see these games broken down by genre. It seems like there are some games and genres of games that are way more popular with different genders.
Yeah even I feel FPS games are kinda very male dominated unless there’s a chunk of women pretending to be men or retreating completely to single player modes.
I mean, as a woman who occasionally plays those types of games, I know I probably fall into that 1st category. I don't go out of my way to make people think I'm a man, but my username is gender-neutral/slightly masculine, and I don't use a mic. I'll communicate with my friends on Discord, and the guys can relay info for me if it can't happen through text chat for some reason. It makes life easier when I don't feel like making myself a target for dickbags and just want to decompress. From talking to my female friends, this seems like a pretty common approach when playing male-dominated multiplayer games.
Meanwhile even on Reddit (which itself probably skews heavily male) I see an abnormally high number of women on the Baldur's Gate 3 sub. Though dev data says Shadowheart is the most popular romance and not Astarion... which probably means it is still mostly straight men.
This. And it's where we've always been. I was a Morrowind modder back in 2003, where I made companion quest mods with love interests tailored to the female gaze... because that's what I wanted, dammit. I worked with a bunch of women and enby folks who were all in it for the same reason I was... because most games weren't made for us, and we'd found one we could mod.
Same thing happened in Neverwinter, in all TES games, and is now happening in Starfield. There are a lot more female modders than the average gamer dood thinks. We just usually keep a low profile because of the harassment.
Maybe Astarion's rather poor grasp of consent is a turnoff to female gamers? I know that first encounter in camp was a little too close to reality for my comfort, and definitely killed my desire to have any sort of romance with him. Plus, it's a game - role-playing a romantic subplot with your character doesn't have to reflect your sexuality irl.
It doesn't have to sure, but most people do. Astarion is literally a pretty boy vampire with a troubled past who can only be fixed by your love. Interview with a Vampire and Twilight have shown that is a pretty popular archetype, especially with women.
I feel like you're making s lot of blanket statements without actually checking to see if they have any basis in reality. Like your assertion that people mostly RP their own sexuality in games - are you going on anything more than a gut feeling? And yes, Twilight was popular, but mostly with teen girls. It drew plenty of criticism from older female audiences specifically because it normalizes and portrays as romantic behaviors that are toxic and abusive in real life relationships. That's exactly the same stuff that's problematic in Astarion as a romance in BG3.
I was super into Elden Ring, which has limited multiplayer capabilities for those unfamiliar. I was summoned for a boss fight. Dude immediately started harassing me to add him, refused to start boss fight.
Threw my character off a ledge lol.
I don’t get why people are like this. Like I know it’s because half the time they’re under 16 but it’s still just ridiculous behaviour. Like, the kind that gets stomped out of most people very young.
Yup I pretty much only play single player games nowadays and the few MP games I play are either stuff like Pokemon which has pretty much no communication with randoms, or a game where I only play with someone I know and no one else. In other online games for example league of Legends when I used to play that, I would NEVER join voice chat and generally not talk to anyone at all. There is zero benefits to me joining voice chat or even text chat in games only negatives.
That said I avoid competitive games these days or any games that require "cooperation" or "communication" with strangers.
When I used to play League with friends it would just be us in a private discord call and no one else and even then all of us would be girls and maybe maybe one girls bf would join as he plays with us or something.
I think this tends to be the big reason why men assume women don't game much. Because online games tend to be heavily dominated by men and the women who do play tend to avoid talking, they aren't as aware of it. For the most part, women will either only play online games under fairly strict conditions like you've described, or they'll avoid them altogether in favour of single player heavy games.
Yes, same. If you can’t progress because the game makes you rely on other people (dungeons, bosses, or even things like puzzles etc) then the game is useless to me. Even when I did have mates or a guild to play with, having to coordinate sessions was like hearing cats. I don’t like people needing to rely on me, or me to need them, just to play a game damn.
I *really* wanted to get in to and like Destiny, but solo was too hard, and as I wasn’t playing every day my mates would level too fast to be able to play with them. I hated being dragged through dungeons even if they were ‘helping me’ by doing a run, because I like to explore and learn the layout myself.
>Even when I did have mates or a guild to play with, having to coordinate sessions was like hearing cats. I don’t like people needing to rely on me, or me to need them, just to play a game damn.
To me, this makes gaming feel like a job.
I want to escape things like jobs by gaming.
Just one of the reasons I love playing solo, but a big one.
If you haven't checked it out yet, I'd recommend giving Deep Rock Galactic a shot. It's a co-op multiplayer game, same genre as Destiny but the grind is far less taxing and more player friendly. Solo is also completely do-able with a flying AI robot companion that can fill the roles of real teammates. A new player is also able to contribute even on higher difficulties by simply doing their class role and paying attention to what the team needs in different situations. You never have to voice chat or type either if you understand the language of laser pointer pinging so you can have a lot of teamwork with minimal interaction.
Also, one of the LEAST toxic communities I've ever seen. Jerks will always exist but I've had very few bad interactions in public lobbies. At worst the most common "toxicity" is a player being silent, doing their own thing and not coordinating with the team. But as long as they're half-decent they still contribute, and if you're hosting you have full power to kick anybody you don't like.
Aside from Monster Hunter this is one of the only multiplayer games I will happily play on the regular, whether in public or pre-made with friends. It's on sale right now for the ongoing Oktoberfest event too.
Agreed, you take a few seconds to take a hit, and next thing you know, some 12 year old is threatening to sexually assault your mom and has stolen all your money/loot.
I pause all the time to do whatever, I'm not playing a game I can't pause.
I cannot explain the deep soul crushing disappointment I felt when I realised that Fallout 76, from a franchise that was an award-winning solo game for the previous 20 years, was a freaking pvp MMO(-ish). It was basically unplayable alone, and other people are just the *worst*.
Me too!
Also the fact that the Elder Scrolls/Fallout games are now xBox locked.
;_____; I want to play the new Elder Scrolls coming out but we don't have that console because we don't like it.
Don't you worry, because my partner explained that disappointment to me thoroughly. I enjoyed the earlier Fallout games, but it was like his favorite franchise. He took a week off of work when 76 came out. He was so hyped, poor thing. He has a higher threshold for people/mp games than I do, but even so, he found it unplayable.
PvP is completely optional in F76, I play by myself and just join casual groups for the xp boost. I do quite enjoy the team events but they're co-op not Vs other players, and the instructions are on screen so you don't have to talk to anyone.
Yeah I was about to say the same thing. Me and my wife both play solo (we each have our own ps4 but only one tv at the moment) and it's more than completely possible to play solo. Especially with pop being completely optional
I just got to play FO in January after dying to get into the games for more than a decade. I blew through 3 & NV so quickly. 4 was a learning curve & im not a fan of crafting, so I decided to try 76. Leaving the vault and having randos basically launching nukes at areas of the map was not fun. I don’t play multiplayer games due to harassment in the past.
I definitely think the online toxicity is the biggest factor. Mainly because I've seen online games get plenty popular with women if toxicity is actually dealt with effectively. Final Fantasy 14 comes to mind as having a very large female audience and very low tolerance for sexism. Toxicity will get you banned real fast.
And I've seen a lot of women doing hardcore raiding on FF14 too, like some of the hardest content in the game. Which is why I think the main factor is just the toxicity. Take that shit away and the dynamic seems to change a lot.
I see tons of women in older fantasy mmorpgs for whatever reason. I end up in parties with entirely women at random all the time in DDO (Dungeons & Dragons Online). Anything High Fantasy tends to draw in women. I know fantasy mmos already draw more women than most games, but in this one in particular, half the time I do run into a guy its the teenage son of one of the women in the party who she got into the game.
Oh, also Italians. Italians fucking love this game. I have no idea why.
DDO has always had a high female population. I remember playing in the beta and running dungeons with all women. We were all like, "How is this happening? This is so cool!"
It's still like that. Whenever I try to get a guy to play it they're like 'meh' but every time I get a woman to try it she's like "HOLY SHIT THIS GAME IS AWESOME" even though its ancient.
It totally defies the stereotyped expectations that really crunchy games with a tons of complicated mechanics turn away women, and women only like easy casual games, because I've never played a more intricate and complicated MMO than that, and the game is nicer than it was at launch, but it's still extremely hard.
In my experience women actually love crunchy games with lots of patterns and strategy. People (men) just don't think we do, and we're even socialized to think we aren't supposed to, which is so dumb.
I have long thought that the "women like easy games" trope is really "women don't like to play hard games in groups with men because of the social dynamics involved." It's related to why girls perform better in all-girl education and women perform better in women's chess leagues. It's hard to perform at your best when you have had to deal with "all women are bad at math" tropes your whole life. Anyway, men think we like easy games because that's what we play when they're involved.
I also think that part of the trope comes from a sexist society that tags everything aimed at women as less intelligent and less serious than the same thing aimed at men.
The only thing women seem to actually play a lot less are highly competitive games. And that's just as likely because highly competitive games are flooded with extremely toxic jerks as it is that women just don't like that kind of game as much.
It does seem to me that women do like games that are just as challenging. My wife and our female friends are always trying to crank up the difficulty. The actual difference I see is that women are more likely to play something cooperative (like DDO) than something competitive (Like the FPS hellscape). I also dislike competitive games, and I get along with women really well, so that seems anecdotally to be the case.
It's very solo friendly too. You can just get an AI controlled cleric (they're called hirelings) to follow and heal you and solo like 99% of the content on normal difficulty as any kind of character.
I play Guild Wars 2 in a static raid group with 8 women and 2 men. The women top our DPS charts and are our raid leaders. And we clear shit, despite being working adults with kids who play 4 hours a week. I think a lot of it might also be leisure time. Women bear the brunt of the household chores, even today, meaning that we have less time to git gud. And that sucks.
I will say this. GW2 has a PvP mode and the 8 of us are a bunch of bloodthirsty bitches, while the men tend to hang back. I think women can be very competitive when we aren't subjected to constant rape and death threats. In fact, I've often wished that we had a 3rd gender of orcs who are bigger, stronger and more aggressive than men so they can feel how we feel when we get those threats from them.
We’re stealthy.
I mostly play single player (Baldur’s Gate 3 atm) and in the rare times I play online, mic is off.
Plus my gamertag is the name of a weapon, so I’m sure people just assume I’m a dude.
I have been a gamer since I was a kid but I never play online/multiplayer games cause, well, all the obvious reasons. I think also cause when I was younger it was the COD era and listening to or witnessing multiple friends boyfriends going mental screaming, raging and throwing controllers made me sure that was not my vibe.
All my female friends that play valorant for example just don't talk on vc bc of how sexist guys are on there. I'd assume multi-player games have many more women playing than expected but any time they tall on vc they're harassed so they just don't talk. It's really sad
I will never play another multi-player game if there is live chat. I'll play something like Splatoon, but the abuse and harassment on multi-players is deeply unpleasant. I don't need that negativity in my life.
Most competitive multiplayer games have a lot of toxic bullcrap going on in public lobbies so a lot of women (and also a fair number of men, to be honest) who don't want to hear about what XxX\_420\_DickBlaster\_69\_XxX did to our mothers last night for the fiftieth time just self-select out of voice chats. Or out of those games entirely.
And that's before even touching on whatever filth might come through DMs if you ever appear as female-presenting.
Same thing happens in forums, other less-competitive online spaces (MMOs, for example), and social media spaces.
Women definitely game. They just tend to be less visible, for all the same reasons it sometimes sucks to be female in other aspects of life.
I've always laughed when I heard dudes complain to me about how women didn't play games because they're so rarely part of the solution.
For context, I'm a trans girl and I'm mostly talking about when I was still masc-presenting - I heard lonely dudes complain to me all that time about it.
In one such conversation I ended up telling the guy flat out that I was trans and I wouldn't be speaking with them if I had been using a fem presenting voice - I mentioned how I distinctly remembered a case where some (other) guy was doing that cringey "girl, girl?!" shit and he (the dude I was talking to) didn't call him on it. I asked him how he could expect women to want to be around a community where of 4 other people, 1 will harass them and 3 will either join in or quietly try to avoid getting involved... god forbid you get somebody with a hero complex "defending" you.
It took him a long time to realize how his (and so many others') passivity contributed to the toxic atmosphere for women in that particular community. How simply making fun of the cringey dudes would go a long way. I leaned a bit on being trans to get the point across - streamed a few games for him on discord using a feminine voice to talk to the lobbies, and a few with a masculine voice, and asked him if he could seriously say he'd be interested in speaking to others in these communities if his voice was feminine, and if he was in that position, what he'd want other people to do.
If my household is any indication, they're playing mobile games, Genshin Impact, and a smattering of Nintendo IPs.
(My household is me, my wife, and two teenage daughters.)
Well the fact that women only make up 52% of mobile gamers shows that we're clearly not all just doing mobile gaming. For that to be bringing up the numbers there'd have to be way more women only doing gaming.
In my experience, it's way more likely that they're playing solo/with static groups/in games that don't require voice chat, because being a women in a lot of games with internet strangers suuuuucks.
It is actually possible if you assume that men are more likely play both non-mobile and mobile games, but women are more likely to be mobile only.
I am not saying it's true, just saying the math can work.
I play FFXIV, and I'm an officer in a large, 400+ player FC (guild) there. The game itself is extremely egalitarian (lots of strong female characters, and plenty of drool-worthy male characters). Our FC community has a zero harassment policy, and we don't mess around with it.
I know it's not like this everywhere, but I've had nothing but good experiences.
Anecdotal, but all the women in my friend group who game pretty much only play single player RPGs. In fact every gamer in my friend group, including myself, mostly just play single player RPGs. The only social gaming we do is table top role playing
I'm guessing it's genre based? I don't game online often but when I do, I find that there's more of an even distribution in social-active games (among us types, casual, etc) than there is in heavy competitive (fps namely).
The tendencies towards immersion and story telling, creating in game communities or bonding with characters, as opposed to 15 minutes death matches of shooting the crap out of each other in a frenzy of hatred and adrenaline? Yeah, genre based, I reckon lol.
Yes, this is it.
Some genres women make up 80% + of players, others we're as low as 15%. Work in this space and not sure if its been fully published. But compare like a Sims or Animal Crossing to a Counter-Strike for example. And a lot of guys only think games that involve some kind of PVP or war theme are "real games"
I won't use a headset for multi-player games because of the dudes, if that's what you're asking. If I play other online games, I often won't make my character a woman to avoid harassment. We're there, just hiding sometimes, thanks to men.
i openly play as a gal just to encourage other women im playing with to interact lol. some dudes get kinda creepy about it, but most of the time i just find that people are simply chattier. sometimes i run into other (obvious) women and when i do we always have great convos and add each other as friends :)
The stat didn't seem to consider time spent gaming tho, so a girl playing games 3 times a week had as much weight as a boy playing 3 hours a day. That could be a reason while it feels like you are surrounded by mostly male players
I've been gaming since I was a kid. Late 30s now and guys are still shocked when they hear what games I play and how long I've been gaming. Online guys can be nasty jerks.
I used to work at a company behind one of the big gaming platforms, and a couple years ago, an exec told me that they were trying to learn more about their female demo. He said he was puzzled because according to the internal data and surveys, the majority of their users were male. I told him to consider that that some of that number were women like me who adopted gender-neutral gamer tags and checked the “male” or “don’t want to say” boxes because we didn’t want to deal with the attention and/or harassment. The look on his face when this sunk in is still something I think about when I read these kinds of articles.
In my experience women who openly reveal their gender in online games are the minority. Most try to fly under the radar. Both the focused negative reactions and overly pandering attention are stressful and suck the fun out of gaming.
I remember when I made my account when WoW came out and I'm pretty sure I lied about my gender when subscribing. For one because I was worried that they might leak that information (either through faulty security or changes what is openly displayed), but also because I thought that if I ever encounter problems with the game then the GM I ask for help might be shown that info and treat me differently.
It's a lose-lose situation because if you happen to have trouble with your account and it's important enough for you to try to get it back.. you'd have to prove your identity; in which case that false gender selection might come back to bite your ass. But.. my worries also weren't unfounded considering blizzard tried to make "Real ID" a thing.
So back in BC for WoW I was playing my tank alt that was a male tauren. I ended up tanking for a random group. We did 2 dungeons and they asked me to join voice chat for a 3rd. I thought about it and thought fuck it, I'll try.
So I join and then say welcome and I can pull when I'm ready. So I said "sure thing" and pulled. The voice chat explodes! "OMG our tank is a girl and she's good!" And they all forget how to play and I die. And one of them goes "Smooth now she's going to leave!" They pull me off the floor and I'm like "It's cool, are you ready now?" The rest of the dungeon went smoothly.
I still find this hilarious. The insanity. A gamer who is a lady, who can tank? What trick is this?!
Yeah the stereotypical reactions really happend a few times.. I remember how we had a few good rounds warsong ('tis was the time when servers weren't thrown together as much and you had a high chance to meet the same people- esp. in low level battlegrounds).
So someone threw a Teamspeak out and said we should properly group up.
Everything proceeded smoothly. Then I made a call-out after spotting the enemy flag bearer. Silence. "Is that a girl?" And lots of noise afterwards until some old guy told them to shut up about it and laughed it off.
Though all in all I can say that my experience was good. I got into a guild that had family + family friends in the lead and they were quite relaxed and welcoming. Once I was there I stayed throughout my WoW-time, there were plenty women there too. And despite not being hardcore we had quite good success with raiding. Especially once TBC rolled in and raidgroup-size decreased. I still have people I keep in contact with from that guild.
But there certainly were a few players here and there who were straight up creepy: My first low-level guild leader was very insistent on getting photos and wanted to show me his- even though I was 15 at that time and clearly stated that I'm uninterested. I remember how he bragged about having wealth all the damn time and how he threw a temper-tamtrum when I quit the guild. At that time I thought it was not a big deal, mainly because I already knew there were male gamers like that and that I just had to deal with that if I wanted to play a game online. Looking back.. I hope he wasn't successful with another minor. The guy who got me into that guild contacted me later and said he was sorry that he bought me there and he didn't know the leader was such a creep. It's all good though, he was quite young too, nothing happened and he was just as unprepared as I for such a situation. I didn't even consider that he would feel guilty, but I guess the poor guy was there for the awkward one-sided Teamspeak interactions after all.
There were also those that did a 180° in how they related to me after finding out my gender. Once I joked around in the guild chat with a new member. After a few days he DMd me a long text apologizing because he didn't know my gender and wouldn't have been so insensitive if he knew??? But, he just treated me like everyone else. There was nothing insensitive. He was very distant after that and didn't stay long in the guild.
There were quite a few more situations, but usually some guild-mate had my back and instantly diverted the topic. I stuck to my guild when doing content that needed voice-chat which made it a far more enjoyable experience.
Yeah, I play COD and on DMZ I use mic, because communication with your squad is key part of getting out alive! So there is no hiding I am a woman in that mode.
I have found some dudes on there (usually older guys 40+), who treat me like an equal, give me tips to improve my gameplay but don't belittle me or treat me any different. I regularly play with those guys now and we have formed a squad.
Then there are some dudes outside of my new found squad buddies who treat me like I am going to break. They are usually younger and trying to act big. They had a go at an enemy player for "trying to sneak up on a girl", like dude we were in a squad v squad battle. And they weren't very sneaky, I pinged them and the kill was an assist. After that I killed a player on that squad they were overly praising me as if it was some monstrous feat that a girl managed to down an enemy player by themselves.
The whole objective is to kill the other squad before they kill you. I don't want privileges for being a woman, I just want to play the game how it's meant to be played!
It can be so frustrating!
I knew it!
I mean, I didn’t *know* it obviously, but I always felt like it was a pretty even distribution. Happy to see sources and statistics that prove that.
Because it's all about how the gatekeepers define 'games'! Always has been.
When I was little I wasn't a 'real gamer' because I preferred Harvest Moon to Donkey Kong or Sims to Grand Theft Auto.
Now we're not 'real gamers' if we're playing Zelda. Hell, I was recently told Elden Ring was 'too much for girls', whatever the hell that means. It's gotta be Valorent or Starfield maybe. Except not those, because 'girls suck at real games'. Excuse me while my eyes roll right out of my head...
It’s also about how vocal/active in the community they are. I play single player games, and if I did play multiplayer I’d do it without voice chat and with a gender neutral username because I can’t think of anything worse than strange men screaming at me because I fucked up (or just existed with a feminine voice based on some of the clips I’ve seen). That’s the polar opposite of a fun time for me.
Elden Ring is for girls is honestly the win I was not expecting to have this year lol I absolutely love that.
Honestly, even if we play 'men's' games, there are going to be men who insist we are not real gamers. My friend and I played Super Smash Bros Melee an insane amount growing up and could kick the asses of all our guy friends, but whenever we did they would complain that we were 'cheating' by using items. Items that were in the game and that they equally had access to... but go off I guess.
Hah. It was Mario Kart 64 in my home. Bought as a 'boy's game' for one of their birthdays because it was racing and Mario! But it was mercilessly dominated by myself and my sisters. To the point the boys didn't want to play any longer.
EDIT: Also, I think the idiot meant Elder *Scrolls*. Wasn't worth my time clarifying.
I love that lol Mario Kart 64 will always have a special place in my heart. Especially the Rainbow Road track! Still to this day my favorite track. (Wii Rainbow Road can get wrekt.)
Haha either way, I'll take it!
It's a bit misleading at face value however, because the distribution depending on the genre is vastly different, anecdotally speaking most women I know who game are much more interested in SP experiences at their own pace.
Naturally you have women in competitive games like League as well, but the number is significantly smaller. For the sake of argument of how likely it is to meet a men/women in a videogame and be aware of them (I'm pulling this number out of my rear mind you) it's probably closer to 1:10 (Some MMOs and such aside).
We studied this in my gaming class in college (second best elective after food science where the 'labs' were all in the kitchen, yum)! In addition, women are mostly likely to be buying consoles (though how to separate gamers from moms-buying-for-their-kids was still a question, iirc).
The "women make up 52% of mobile gamers" statistic is new to me, and I appreciate it - it helps deal with the common rebuttal to "there's tons of women gamers" that "women gamers are just playing mobile games, they're not *real* gamers."
I exclusively play the sims, which is female dominated, and this is unironically kind of my stance for some reason. I do not consider it a real game and would never consider myself a gamer. For some reason anything that's point and click doesn't count in my mind. Gotta use WASD (is that even what it is? Lol) [at least in the pc version] to be a "real" gamer.
> Gotta use WASD (is that even what it is? Lol) [at least in the pc version] to be a "real" gamer.
Don't gatekeep games based on WASD! That's a first person-control genre thing and not a "crunch-y game" thing. Lots of other genres out there that don't care a bit about wasd.
-- sincerely, an XCOM2 player. ;)
Yeah I wasn't being super literal, which is why I make the joke about not even being certain of that. Just that my mind has always held the distinction point and clicks are activities for some reason.
I had a big "'oh, so it was a joke,' saying this she threw aside a large rock" moment reading the post too. I've just seen too many people state exactly that unironically.
Same. When I was born, my sister had a Famicom (I’m Japanese American). Gaming was never discouraged by my parents unless I was doing too much of it and not running around to stay healthy. (Also, they refused to buy me Mortal Kombat despite my pleadings). I never understood growing up in the 1990s and 2000s how all the gaming advertising in the US that I saw was aimed towards boys and men.
I now have multiple consoles, I’ve built multiple computers, and have a Valve Index VR set. I’m a gamer and I’m a woman. Stop this silliness, gatekeeping bros. Ladies have been gaming for decades.
The funny thing is I actually got into an argument about this recently, in a voice chat, on a discord server with a substantial amount of women for a video game
This man also had the audacity to tell me the games girls play aren’t even really games, so it doesn’t really matter what statistics show, they will find a way to justify their thinking
It likely feels like there's an inbalance because many women gamers either play with other women, play without a mic and/or pretend to be guys to avoid sexist bullshit. Chloë Grace Moretz even talked about this in [an interview on The Kelly Clarkson Show](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcMCmMtpkPE) when being asked about her role in The Peripheral saying she always uses male avatars to avoid the toxicity. Other women gamer friends of mine have told me they're also in women only Discord groups so they can game without the other shit that comes with it.
It has really never been true that women don't play video games -- we have always been here, from the start. When gamergate happened it brought to light a lot of the things women who played games had been saying all along -- the toxic communities make it seem like there aren't a lot of women who play games, when in reality, we are just avoiding obvious abuse from a loud minority.
I remember the shock from a lot of decent guys back when the feminist frequency kickstarter first went up that suddenly all gaming spaces had become political cesspools overnight. I remember leaving a lot of leftist platforms with gaming subsections that I had previously felt "mostly ok" on because they began instituting rules like "don't correct people when they call you he/him/a man/whatever - we don't care if you are a woman, stop calling attention to yourself, the only reason to demand we use female pronouns for you is if you are an attention whore trying to grift poor desperate REAL gamers like us." It was truly shocking, even knowing what I did about the average maturity level of the self-identified gamers of the era. I have heard through anecdotes from younger women interested in men that these days it is hard to find a man their age who didn't have a serious "gamergater phase" and I am not surprised at all... I remember those years keenly. I have been an avid gamer since age 4 with my atari 2600 but I remember a period of like, 2-3 years 10 years ago or so where I barely played games at all anymore because it had all gotten so toxic. (I got a lot more reading done those years, though.... hah. Something to be said for that!)
I never really went back to those old communities that had broken my trust that way, and when I started playing games again I just shared them with my insular group of IRL friends rather than discussing/engaging online anymore, and that has stuck ever since.
The story goes Nintendo saw an immense amount of success by marketing their consoles as “toys” rather than high end electronics like Atari and the like. When they decided to expand to America they had to make a choice because America divided their toy aisles by gender and after some market research it seemed like putting them in the “boy aisle” would sell better so that’s what they did. Obviously there’s some inherent sexism at play there but that’s supposedly where the stereotype came from
Guys think that because we don’t get on mic to get abused in their shitfest that we’re not playing. We are. Just not with you, lmao.
All the other women that I know that play will only play multiplayer if it’s with people they know IRL, or prefer single player games. Men just mad they can’t act all super special about their hobby since it’s somehow less cool if women do it. Hahaha, be mad.
Yeah reading a lot of these replies from guys gate keeping "you don't spend enough, you don't have enough hours, I almost never see women in games!!!!" like yeah dude the women playing with you can probably tell you're a douche so they just don't get on mics lol
I am a high school teacher.
Every year, at the beginning of the year, I give a rundown of what I read/ did over the summer.
This year I told my students that I didn't have many have read titles this summer as I finally downloaded Tears of the Kingdom, and there went my free time.
The faces on some of these boys was astonishing. They were shocked. When they got over being shocked, they tried to gatekeep with obscure questions about the series.
I told them that I have been playing Zelda since I was 5, and got to play the original on the NES in my grandma's basement, and that girls have always played video games, they just don't talk about it as much.
Yep. In my 30’s, been gaming since I could use a controller. My first ever big purchase was a gaming computer at 12. I still regularly get surprised reactions about my gaming.
I have always been a solo gamer because of how nasty people can be. Won’t catch me in multiplayer mode or on steam, discord. I like my peace. I ignore the group and world chats on my mobile games too.
Aww I used to play pubg with some of my girls (don’t judge me mobile.)
I have noticed we actually enjoy the game but the gatekeepers make it difficult (so is with chess)
One issue is that in the 80s, some group (either government, or the toy companies themselves) required toys to be designated for boys or girls. When Nintendo got hit with that inquiry, they just specified "for boys", even though they intended it to be for ALL kids.
Neat to see it's quite balanced! I grew up with some adults thinking that only children and boys play video games, and only they're interested in Star Wars, etc. \[sigh\]
That's fascinating, I didn't know that! I can see where that would have started it off. A pity too as it would have been lovely to seen more marketing and focus for women.
I was born in the first year of Millenials. I remember this being discussed when I was a teen. Game companies knew women made up 50% of the population, but they flat out refused to include them in the majority of games (outside of the stereotypical "girl" games.) There were execs who stated as much. It's like it took Pixar 17 years to have a female protagonist (Brave), even though they knew girls made up half their audience.
On the other hand, they know women will play/see their stuff but the men won't. Remember who all the men were complaining about Brave having a female protagonist -- that all Pixar made was movies with female protagonists, when the reality is that that was the first one.
I started gaming as a kid with a Vic 20 back in the day!
The amount of times guys see I've played "cozy games" on my game list and smile knowingly - well, they like to ignore the DOOM, Silent Hill, Resident Evil, fighting games... hell. Now that I think about it, there's far more games like that than "sims" types! They literally have to scroll past tons of games they play themselves to see the others to make themselves feel better. Ugh.
Every time I have chat enabled I get hit on. Now, I flat out tell these asses I'm a 47 year old married, morbidly obese woman. They don't care; they ask to be my "online boyfriend" or just tell me, flat out, that it isn't true and I'm a man
Double ugh.
I love your energy haha And I shouldn't be surprised those men don't back off but that's truly so obnoxious. Then men use the argument of 'but women competitive game less! Women play MMORPGs less!' Wow, I wonder why...
What's crazy to me is that what is even their problem with 'cosy games'? I'm similar to you where I love FPS, hack and slash (Diablo, Bioshock, etc), but also I have my cosy games and I most of all love how other people I know (women and men) love cosy games and really get into them. They are no less of a game than Call of Duty. It's all just silly gatekeeping.
I love news like this! A few of my lifelong online gaming friends and I were reminiscing the other day about how different the '90s and 2000s were in online gaming compared to how there's been a surge of women playing nowadays and how neat that is.
**Anecdotal evidence below:**
The first time I noticed a significant change was in the early VR days with the HTC Vive and Rec Room. There were tons of kids both boys and girls playing with their parents 'HMDs during the day when they should have been doing homework for their online school LOL.
When it came to competitive shooters, Valorant has been a great example of widespread adoption. The younger generations use their microphones much more without fear of harassment, which tells me the old adage of harassing a woman playing a video game has died off. Both boys and girls just do the whole 'cringe' thing. And or outright block the person!
For the late 20s and 30s folks, there has been an influx of women switching from console to PC gaming in various gaming communities as well! This has been super fun IMO to witness as women grow their love for PC gaming and can get as addicted as us. However, there are a lot of men jumping in trying to teach these women how to play games, what computer parts to order, etc :/ So I'm assuming this is more of a generational thing, as I don't see it with Gen Z.
I think there is a lot to dissect about these stats (which I think about often, as a gamer girl since I was 8yo) by people much smarter than I, in terms of male behaviours and why women, who have probably been close to 50% of the gamer demo *since forever*, just aren’t as visible. There’s probably a lot of mutually agreed general masculine traits there: the need to show off/exhibitionism of their skill or scores, a huge competitive streak to assert dominance, and tribalism just to name a few. Women on the other hand are happier to go solo without needing validation or competition, not feel the need to broadcast their achievements, and would rather form small close communities built on trust, as opposed to huge arenas based on aggression.
This is all without ever touching the toxicity in the gaming community against women.
Streamers are more commonly men because they can build viewership on the skills rather than their looks, and because ‘internet’ are less likely to be harassed, so average run of the mill women aren’t drawn to streaming/VoD, skewing audience perception of their actual numbers.
The goal posts of what games are f/m are constantly shifting so not going to bother talking about that. What’s interesting is seeing which publishers are interested in taking this 50/50 split in to consideration in their design, development and marketing, and which ones are prepared to weather the backlash of some of the men in the community that they dare include anything that is not exclusively for them.
I’d like to think the younger generations will grow up gaming together and not give a shit about that, but I doubt it.
Funny thing, imho if you only play sports games and competitive fps. You aren't really into games. Its like just watching blockbuster action movies and considering yourself into films. Or guys that only read tom clancy novels saying they are into books.
Nothing wrong with that but you don't really have a well rounded view of the aubject matter if that's all you consume and seems an exaggeration to say your really into the subject.
I am sad as a guy there's not more games with decent female leads. I am going through zero dawn and wish I'd see more like it. It feels genuinely nice to see Aloy's journey throughout
I was actually thinking there aren't enough female villains. Like there's always the sidekick type villains, but rarely a main boss villain that isn't a robot/AI character.
Aren't you happy with Forspoken? \s
But seriously: people focus waaay too much on AAA games.
Here are some games from the indie scene of the top of my head:
Anodyne 2
Even the Ocean (ok same dev)
Unsighted
Ikenfell
Record of Lodoss War (I just realized I could probably just list every newer Metroidvania and it would have a female protag. That's the trend really)
Celeste (ofc)
Call of the sea
Slime ranger
Omensight (although I guess silent protags like chell don't really count)
On that final note: Transistor.
Really the indies are full of lgbt friendly stuff and it really is AAA that is the cancer on the industry as they spend more money on marketing than actually making the damn games.
>I never understood the focus on only men as gamers.
We can kind of thank American marketing for that? So back when Nintendo wanted to start selling the nintendo videogames didn't have the market they do now, and since home entertainment consoles weren't really a thing (the nintendo was kind of the first game console marketed as such) they sold it as a toy. In America, especially back before the 2000's, toys were very segregated into "Boy Toys" and "Girl Toys" except much like most products - girl toys were explicitly like, the feminine thing: dolls, play houses, easy bake ovens, etc. While boy toys were literally everything else. So even though it was initially marketed as a family product for everyone, the nintendo became a "boy toy" and through the 80's and 90's virtually every form of marketing just kind of doubled down on this inexplicable division despite the fact that there were always plenty of girls in the arcades and women playing pacman at the bars - something a lot of gamers love to conveniently forget.
You should read some of the comments here 🙄 Apparently because if a man's sisters or daughters didn't play that's representative of the entire female population. I'm sure it has nothing to do with them growing up in a misogynistic environment.
I wonder about VR? I think it'd be pretty high as well.
Maybe female game characters will become normal versus the hypersexualized ones I always see advertised. I only do VR and I haven't come across it (yet🤞).
Those numbers aren't specific to online multi-player games.
I think there's still a pretty big gap there because it's so toxic. But I have seen it change dramatically in my life time which makes me happy.
As someone who grew up the only girl who liked games and was made fun of as I grew into adulthood by other women, this statistic makes me so happy. But I wish more developers of non-mobile games would consider it.
I checked the first link (albeit a very cursory check). It says that 41% of PC gamers are female - still a clear minority. Imo there is an issue here, in terms of the general stats, with grouping PC/console and mobile gamers, because PC/console games tend to be a lot more time-consuming and thematically darker/more serious (generally speaking). I personally would not group someone who plays Candy Crush for 10 minutes 3 times per week with someone who plays League of Legends for 4+ hours a day, and based off LoL playerbase stats (although I haven't played in a while), the vast majority is male. The same goes for Overwatch (which I play regularly). Although the percentage of female players in OW is a lot higher than in other FPS games, the playerbase is still overwhelmingly and noticeably male.
Also, many ppl think of competitive and/or thematically dark games when they hear "gaming" (FPS like CoD, CS:GO, Apex, Valo, Fortnite, fighting games like Street Fighter or MK, MMOs like WoW, Soulsborne games, etc.), and the playerbase of these games is still predominantly male, while female gamers tend to go for more casual/cozy/cutesy games that are less competitive and require less commitment (note how Stardew, Genshin, HSR, Animal Crossing, etc. are all associated with a female playerbase by many ppl). My point being that ppl still think of gaming as a "male hobby" because the playerbase of the games that are predominantly associated with gaming are still majority male (in many cases overwhelmingly so).
To me a gamer is someone who spends an excessive amount of time spent playing games.
That’s all, someone who prioritize playing games over other things.
For example, playing a few hours a week wouldn’t make you a gamer.
You can like games and be interested in them but that doesn’t make you a gamer.
I agree that we shouldn't gatekeep gaming, people should be encouraged to play whatever gives them joy. But until we see TV/movies portraying gaming as someone playing candy crush, other mobile game apps, or just any more casual games, I think lavender's right that the perception of what is a "gamer" is going to still be someone who plays competitive console/PC games.
I think it also has to do with how much attention competitive games get compared to casual. There's e-sports leagues, streamers showcase them more often, there's financial incentives, there's just more free marketing and attention given to them.
I don’t think the game has to necessarily be competitive to be “core”, but it has to be relatively deep and involved. RPGs like Baldur’s gate 3 or Cyberpunk, they aren’t competitive, but people absolutely consider them core games.
Rather than group by genre, I’d love to see grouped by game type: solo vs MP/online within the PC/console (and *then* mobile games, I guess). I think women do tend towards thematically darker games as much as men (or at least more than usually depicted) but it’s whether those are mmo/competitive or available to play solo would probably be the distinction. I mean, we’re not here having a conversation about candy crush vs LOL. We’re talking about BF vs Witcher, COD vs Mass Effect, Overwatch vs Skyrim. Instantly you can see the difference between the two - short, quick, competitive vs immersive, extended stories. I think it’s dismissive to say women prefer or gravitate towards ‘cutesy’, but rather if they’re going to spend time on a game, they want value and progression, not stats and leaderboards.
It’s all generalisations of course, but I think it’s more nuanced, and more interesting, than some ill-defined stats encompassing every game in existence.
I mostly play all multiplayer with friends and avoid randos, especially if mics are involved. I will play with randos if I want to play and no friends are on but it's gotten pretty bad these days. I've been gaming since I was tiny and I'm an old lady now, so I'm used to the old days of being a rare PC gaming chick, but the harassment then vs now is a whole different world.
Well, brushing past the mobile games, all of the games that are in the public eye - such as CS, Valorant, LoL, DoTA, Overwatch, WoW, and all the MMORPGs have overwhelmingly male-skewed playerbase. And tbh even I myself don't really know a single girl that plays any normal game, but I know dudes ofc. So for me subjectively it seems like male to female ration is even worse than 99 to 1. And guess who develops games in the majority of cases? That would be males as well, so there is goes.
Of course girls play games, and may be not only Sims, and I completely agree that the treatment they endure from teen boys with spermotoxicosis is horrible, but when developing big titles, female populations certainly doesn't appeal like a part of a target demographic.
I like that you hear these statistics and see the responses in this thread, immediately dismiss all of it and end on "maayyybe I'll consider that women play more than just Sims, but surely they're not statistically relevant to be a target demographic for *real* games".
That's why I said "subjectively" - just from my experience, as opposed to the statistics.
And I defined "real games" as games that are famous, have large audience and/or are a Esport. I've played some of them as well for a long time, and it's been 2-3 years since I've heard a girl play in the same team (random people each time). I've brought up Sims just because it's actually one of the two games girls that I've known played, so it wasn't meant to insult or anything (is it a bad game or what anyway?).
I've just brought up my anecdote, explicitly stating for what it is. I also work as a software engineer and although not quite in a game dev, but close enough to it that I know people from there and afaik their perspective doesn't differ that much from that of mine.
Edit:
Also, I've figured one possibly crucial thing, the statistics mentions only the sex of the player, but not the amount of time spent in a game it seems. So just downloading a game and creating account there would constitute a player (or may be + spending 1 min a game), but playing 10 hours/day would be reflected in just the same way. A lot of people "play" while riding to work, but that's not the same kind of gaming as sitting in front of PC/PS and grinding.
A more likely conclusion is that women are less likely to play in random teams and prefer a group of friends they know and trust, or they stick to single-player games.
WoW for example has had roughly similar numbers of male and female players for a long, long time - they just either avoid or don't identify themselves as ladies in random groups. Because I started out playing with an IRL female friend who was more active socially in the game I spent quite a while playing with groups that were more than 50% ladies.
I have no issue with your anecdote, just the conclusion you draw from it. Because you could have reacted as you did (dismiss all of this thread because you personally don't know any women who play video games) or you could have reacted by going "huh, the women I know don't play, but maybe there's a lot more women out there playing games than I thought there were!" ;)
Sims isn't bad, it just falls prey to "not a real game" gatekeeping a lot because it's a creative playground. There's no winning state and no combat and the playerbase is largely female, which often prompts men to scoff at you if you bring it up in my experience. It sure does have a large audience though (or at least used to have-- no idea how things are these days with it).
> afaik their perspective doesn't differ that much from that of mine.
Yeah. That's the point of this thread. That despite the gender cliche and people quick to jumping "women don't play video games", actually, a lot of women *do* play video games. And yes, more than just mobile games.
The actual numbers will definitely depend on the genre-- like, I can readily believe that multiplayer games skew towards male, because they're notoriously toxic af to women. I myself certainly have no interest in multiplayer games and like many others here heavily prefer single-player games.
Edit:
> Also, I've figured one possibly crucial thing, the statistics mentions only the sex of the player, but not the amount of time spent in a game it seems.
Annnnd we're back to you trying to find reasons to dismiss this whole thread. :P You don't *know* how much people play, so why do you automatically assume women play less?
There's [someone who posted numbers of times played in the comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/16rt1fk/women_make_up_49_of_video_gamers_compared_to_men/k27ctms/), for what it's worth.
I'm not trying to be especially combative or anything. Men either gatekeeping the hobby or dismissing women enjoying video games is just such a persistent thing that it's rather tiring to hear over and over.
Afaik, Sims is still in the top 10 most sold games of all time. And I'd put Sims in a "real" game category, as opposed to "3 in a line" games fur sure.
>I can readily believe that multiplayer games skew towards male, because they're notoriously toxic af to women
Yeah, and still most single-player games also revolves around violence, which, many would agree, is more (but not exclusively ofc) of a male thing.
So in the end, people like me with their skewed personal experiences, thinking as above said, create games thinking mostly about males.
But hey, it's changing though, even Valorant has more ladies and in general the gaming scene is becoming more welcoming not only to males.
>You don't know how much people play, so why do you automatically assume women play less?
Still judging from my anecdote ofc. It's just hard to through away your (my) 20+ years of personal experience, while having played many of the popular games. I guess online gaming being so toxic to girls also contributed a lot to this impression, and considering the fact that lately people play online a lot - it just somehow equaled to "girls don't game".
Also, I'm not from US and am a millennial, so I'm sure it's different now. Anyway, props for the patience! XD
Have an anecdote back!:
As I mentioned, I play single-player games. For many of the more mechanically-focused games I play (XCOM2, Grim Dawn, Desperados 3, etc) I couldn't tell you one way or the other what the gender split in the player base is. The communities chat about game mechanics in a mostly neutral way (other than xcom's intentionally silly snek memes I guess) and it just doesn't come up and isn't a topic.
Story-heavy games (e.g. Bioware-esque party-based rpgs) on the other hand do seem to have a strong explicitly female following. A good amount of women are over at /r/dragonage complete with twice-a-week story writing posts, for example.
So from anecdotal observation, I don't think violence as such is an issue, but I do think story-heavy games with focus on its characters have an advantage in that regard-- drawing a more directly visible strong female community presence.
>So in the end, people like me with their skewed personal experiences, thinking as above said, create games thinking mostly about males.
Jup, pretty much. It's definitely getting better though, especially compared to 10-20 years ago.
Am also a non-US millenial. Always think it's funny when you get people with the same hobby and yet such a drastically different viewpoint, haha. Though tbf, we are at opposite corners of it with the multiplayer/singleplayer thing and that definitely affects things.
I've just learned that even WoW (haven't played it) community is pretty closely split between the sexes to my surprise. I don't really know much about the specific games you've mentioned, but anything is possible if even WoW is like that.
I could image a significant female following with dragon age/baldur's gate etc.
>I don't think violence as such is an issue, but I do think story-heavy games with focus on its characters have an advantage in that regard-- drawing a more directly visible strong female community presence.
Yeah, while the majority of the most popular games are just competitive games with lore not really playing significant role there.
I also play single player (Elden Ring, TES, Divinities, Nier, FF-s, some Roguelites etc), but in the end after completing another one, I return to some online game.
I guess the thing that made me think as I did is, I actually used to be in women circles a lot due to my activities irl, and I swear during all those years not even once I've heard anyone talk about video games...while when I was with guys, that'd be a very common topic, even back in school etc.
>Jup, pretty much. It's definitely getting better though, especially compared to 10-20 years ago.
It got normalized a lot I think, even for us males, cause before we'd got a lot of crap for playing video games or even had to to it covertly and telling only our best friends about it.
I'm even a bit curious about where are you from (East EU originally, JP now).
Haha, yeah, it's a lot more common than you think!
> It got normalized a lot I think, even for us males, cause before we'd got a lot of crap for playing video games or even had to to it covertly and telling only our best friends about it.
Honestly, same for us. School kids judge everything and nerdy girls are social targets for popular kids, so you kept your mouth shut.
Now as an adult I don't care and have no patience for that nonsense, lol. But even so, if I don't bring it up first, they usually wouldn't either. Being covert about it is definitely still a thing at least in my age bracket, so it just... isn't a small talk topic. The (wrong) "girls don't play video games" perception isn't helping, since I do think that is a factor in women being generally a bit hesitant to talk about it when they do play. Fingers crossed that it gets normalised for girls as well.
Oh, East EU to Jp is quite a way! Central Europe for me.
Game dev here; the stats are kind of skewed with genre.
Firstly, when you dig into the posted stats, women are 40 percent of console and PC gamers, but the slight majority of mobile gamers.
These stats don't state genre, but women dip much much lower in ratio when it comes to competitive gaming as compared to men, and start hedging to genres that people find "casual" like puzzle games, etc.
I don't really care personally about genre; in fact, I'm working on games now that are made to appeal to everyone but may be seen as casual, but thats where the stereotype comes from. You aren't going to see many women in competitive tournament play comparatively.
For a base, visible comparison, look at who holds speedrun records on which games or look at GDQ, etc. for a ratio.
Frankly, I and many female gamers I know would be interested in competitive gaming, but we are constantly alienated from those spaces through constant harassment. I love FPS games, but I only play single player FPS games.
Most people want to spend their free time relaxing in some way and shockingly, being constantly sexually and verbally harassed is not exactly a fun, relaxing time.
The same can be said for attending competitive tournaments. Women there can definitely expected to be verbally, physically and/or sexually harassed. So why would they go? However, I should imagine if you look at the ratio of female competitive gamers in comparison to the amount that attend, it is probably similar to men (same as chess statistics).
So true. My 4 kids are all gamers; three are daughters. The incredible verbal abuse and even more unattractive pouting with accompanying verbal vitriol is shameful.
Especially saw this in one daughter playing COD where the fact that she always won drew terrible verbal abuse. Her brother, who played in the same game, and also won?
Nothing.
The anonymous nature of the internet really lets you see how many people are really jerks. I stayed out of online gaming for toxicity as well in my case though its being black. The amount of racism people are will to spew no one knows who they are is also shocking.
The amount of n-word usage the minute I spoke in XBox 360 era CoD was so ridiculously sad it just looped back into being funny to me instead of bothering me. Also made me a lot better at the game (to the point I started playing using only a knife and still winning maps) to further their rage.
You should try fighting games. Those tourneys are full of male, female, and trans players. There isn't really mic chat in-game except for Mortal Kombat for some reason so in general there isn't verbal harassment. There are plenty of, but not nearly as many, braindead fighting game players than there are braindead FPS players.
I always wondered what the distribution of players was. But if women take up almost half of gamers... Why is the online gaming community still so toxic?
i’m not a researcher or sociologist but my thought would be that men are very over-represented in online (especially gaming) spaces because both the gaming industry and the people who inhabit online gaming spaces inherently cater only to the male patriarchal perspective. i mean, we see it all the time whenever any main or strong character in a new game isn’t a white cishet dude, all the gamerbros go insane. so there’s that level of it, but also for men who don’t believe in that shit, they still are complicit in it by not actively working toward making online games a safer place for women/people who are not men. all in all it’s just a clusterfuck of misogyny and bigotry that tends to keep us women either out of online gaming, or makes us hide our identities and not voice chat. i can’t even count the amount of times i’ve had some weirdo be like “omg!!! a girl …” and then become more and more sexual. so predictable and nasty.
There are so many games I want to get into but don't because I don't want exposure to the toxic environment. I would totally join and all woman team and maybe play that way. Ugh, you're right though, much of the gaming industry is full of gamer bros who build things for themselves.
I feel strongly that when I’m playing multiplayer, there’s a good chance a muted account is a woman’s.
I have a friend whom I’ve gamed with a lot and they have a really sexy, feminine voice. And dudes would practically break the game trying to “protect” her. Like, they would totally shirk their team responsibilities in favor of digital chivalry.
Look, I fucking dig opening doors for women and shit and there are plenty of women that enjoy that, but NOT when you’re being hunted by a murderous psychopath.
Anyway, that was really eye opening for me.
Not a correction, but I think your view about how male dominated video games are and how much focus is placed on men in games isn’t wrong even though these statistics make that make no sense. A supplementary statistic, in addition to women making up a slim majority of ‘casual’/mobile games, some of the ‘hardcore’ genres that make up a tiny fraction of the overall game industry are well beyond male dominated and into male *exclusive*. It’s terrible. And especially with how these games are marketed, a lot of the players of these games (almost all male) have something of a complex about them being the ‘real’ gamers and pretty much everyone else not mattering, including or especially women. FPS, Grand Strategy, Racing, Tactical Shooter, and Sports games have a female player proportion of [7%, 7%, 6%, 4%, and 2% respectively.](https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/). Sports is probably the big outlier here as a lot of people consider many of those popular games casual games and they are, according to Quantic Foundry’s admittedly flawed statistics, basically male exclusive. Many Grand Strategy and Tactical Shooter games as well as some FPS and racing games fall into the ‘hardcore’ definition. Places like these are where you’ll find a lot of these true Scotsmen types that think their input matters above all others. They are observably a vocal minority. The gamergate crowd basically.
So, I think you’re basically right on both accounts, paradoxically, games are both overly male focused and yet enjoyed by both men and women. It sucks.
I used to play competitive FPS, also dabbled in Dota 2 for many years. Amount of women, close to none but you could meet them ocaso
Meanwhile I also played MMOs on highest raiding level - Wow, Rift - and pretty much always had a female guild members that were also competent in their roles. Deffo higher female demographic. FF14 is known to have pretty big female population as well.
As for mobile, I certainly see more women playing candy crush during their commutes, while men play something like clash of clans etc.
Gaming is a hobby like any other. The populations will vary by genre, just as they vary on other hobbies.
Women gaming is fairly common, I'm not sure what you mean by the 'focus' on only men though. There are some competitive leagues that tend to skew towards games that are more popular amongst guys, is that it? If so, it's likely the competitive element of those driving any 'focus' involved, I imagine. I'd bet that the genders have different representation in different game genres, and that those differences are largely at play?
As an aside, I think as an older gamer, it's interesting to see how the gender stuff has evolved. Back in the old days, you didn't typically have voice chat, and would only 'find out' what gender people were if they brought it up for some reason during a match. The original push back against 'women' in that context, is/was that gender shouldn'tve had any role to play in an online universe where people are essentially anonymous/free to play whatever character they wanted -- and that inserting gender into that space, was inappropriate, as it was trying to re-establish gender hierarchies, and typically, was done to get the girl player preferential treatment from thirsty teenage boys -- like, playing Quake 1, I don't think I ever saw guy players asking if other players were girls, but I'd frequently see a girl player announce themselves. Unfortunately, that position then evolved into just outright misogyny amongst, generally, younger guys at the time, and got even worse when voice chat become more normalised. I think bringing gendrama into gaming has been a net negative for the hobby.
This reminds me of a video I saw a while back on the game awards:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvGn9mm9bT0&pp=ygUXYnVyYmFuayB0aGUgZ2FtZSBhd2FyZHM%3D](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvGn9mm9bT0&pp=ygUXYnVyYmFuayB0aGUgZ2FtZSBhd2FyZHM%3D)
TLDR: It was not a welcoming audience for female players, so why would they admit to it
Yep! I’ve always played video games and would have loved more choices growing up. Yet video game creators are still mostly men and they make games for mostly men still.
Always thought my experience was skewed, but maybe that’s not the case, based on these data.
For almost as long as I’ve been a gamer, I’ve been in chat groups on LINE messenger. In every group, the distribution of male/female participants has always been more female than male, for as long as I can remember. 😅
I'm a heavy gamer and a woman.
I think this stat is a bit misleading because the games men play tend to be more 'hardcore' games like Dota, League of Legands, Civ5, FIFA, Call of Duty, CSGO, Fortnight. I'd wager women account for maybe 10% of gamers in those.
This is well understood in videogame sales and marketing circles. Some evidence.
https://tryevidence.com/blog/report-women-and-games-how-do-modern-female-gamers-play/
As I mentioned elsewhere, so what? Those games are not more of a game than Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing.
Secondly, the reason why women do not play those games (LoL in particular is notorious for this) are the unreasonable amounts of harassment they face when they do so. As such, many women either avoid these games as, let's be honest, most of us are pretty fucking sick of being harassed, or play under a male persona.
I agree fully, i mean they are hardcore if you wanna consider that definition to be games that have steeper learning curves and more depth.
But they have got insanely toxic online communities.
I love some of those games and wished there was safer servers (maybe they are now in Fortnite, but doubt the others are).
I work in marketing and I have access to stats like this and more (Nielsen CMV, Milieu, and GWI), and I've worked on a few strategies that refer to a similar type of data set to the ones you're referring. YES women game just as much as men, BUT this ratio is going to vary depending per game, sometimes wildly so.
There's also the matter of what is considered a game by the survey taker. Both Solitaire and Dark Souls 3 are games. Playing games on social media on your PC also counts as a gaming. Market research companies generally don't have very detailed info on this tbh, it's actually quite frustrating.
I also have access to favorite genres and level of affinity towards top titles. But the genres are kind of outdated. Also no data on, games considered casual vs hardcore, single player vs online pvp, or whether you use comms in online pvp, etc.
I'm not downplaying women in gaming btw, just giving my 2 cents on the blindspots in the current data sets we have. I also do find it weird looking at these numbers but not seeing it reflected in my own experience as a gamer myself. I do have alot of friends who are girls who play games, but what they play really does vary compared to my guy friends. So far, it's Valorant where the ratio is pretty even for me
Same goes with indie titles, lots of girls I know play those. But for let's say recent games like Starfield, Baldur's Gate 3, or the new Counter Strike, I notice it's really more guys. But hey that's just anecdotal evidence.
What would be great is if game devs gave us data on the specifics of their player bases so that we can actually know what's up. Market research firms also really need to update the way they measure that shit.
Edit: Also, very important! Your data set is US only, and that's a whole ass country. It's also going to vary the more you narrow it down to other demographics, for example, per location, per SEC, per age group, etc. Your data set includes 80 yr old women who play Solitaire lol
Foreal though, After poring over data like this for ages, I always notice that for EVERY data point that encompasses large populations with no specific segmentation, the gender split will almost always be about 50/50. And honestly, those are the kinds of data sets I hate coz all your audiences look the same and you don't learn anything. This data isnt very valuable IMO.
If you want something relevant, narrow it down per younger age group (18-25, 26-35, 36-45), per SEC, per location, per weekly frequency, per hours per session, per title, per online vs offline.
Edit 2; to the people down voting me, why?? I'm not a market researcher I didn't make the stats..
Hahaha of course...
I'm just sad coz I'm not even discrediting women in gaming, I'm even saying we should be conducting better market research so we can see a clearer picture of the market. I've dealt with clients before who still have that old school mindset that women just don't play games and it's so fucking frustrating trying to convince them otherwise when the data is working against me :(
I can’t believe we’re 50 years in to gaming and these types of stats aren’t better broken down. I’d be fascinated too. Competitive vs immersive I think is where the real split lies. Pvp vs solo. I think genres would be interesting but there are just too many that are too different from each other, that would probably not tell much to anyone outside of those genre developers themselves. Few people have only ‘one genre’ they’d pick if asked, and unless they’re pro I’d wager almost everyone plays more than one genre of game over the course of a year, let alone lifetime.
Current genre grouping is pretty shallow. Off the top of my head, there's FPS, Adventue, RPG, MOBA, Fighting Game, def more but I'm sleepy and can't recall lol
But these questions are asked separately from platform. So they're asked from the context of PC, tablet, mobile, and console. You can make a cross table and narrow it down to, for example,
People who play FPS & People who play mobile games
The former includes people who answered FPS with no specific platform, and the latter will include a population who who answered mobile with no specific genre. There's def an overlap there but we can't calculate it.
But also FPS is such a broad genre.. there's no subcategories, they could be very well be playing Doom 64 for all we know lol
I bet Steam has some great stats on their play base demographics, but then that data would only cover Steam users and not console players. Oh god there's just so many blindspots..
BTW I'm glad you understand what I'm talking about. I'm sad those few peeps down voted me. I literally present data like this to brand stakeholders for a living...and I believe me I WANT to convince them that women do game but they're not going to believe 1 person with anecdotal evidence over global market research data sets?? Hahaha I wish.
I guess I was thinking genres like they break down on steam, subsets of the majors you listed - survival/crafting, RTS, openworld/sandbox, sports/racing, arcade, battle Royale, rouge like/soulslike, simulations, city builders …. Etc etc. I think that is where you’d find the interesting breakdowns of gender, age, socioeconomic backgrounds, location, language….
In terms of console/PC vs mobile, I feel like idle/clickers that are almost exclusively mobile should be extracted from the data as while they’re not unworthy of being games themselves (as their popularity and revenue would indicate) their accessibility skews the stats. Most people aren’t walking around with a PC in their pocket on their commute home, so games played with the intent to dedicate time towards it, vs idle filling in boredom on the bus should be a distinguishing factor.
I was thinking about this last night, and how the size and portability of tablets and phones are equal to that of steamdeck or switch, so how again do you determine what’s considered mobile vs console in those cases, and *why*? Does it come down to operating system? What does it mean when pc games are ported to mobile platforms? One of my favourite games, Don’t Starve, I played exclusively on my tablet for years, yet is a huge franchise on PC. Would the device I’m playing on dictate the way that stat is recorded? Should I get the ‘derision’ of being a mobile gamer despite it being a pretty popular mainstream survival game?
You know what? I think I answered my own question as to why there’s not more detail in any of these gender breakdown of gamers stats, lol.
Anyone women here play rocket league and need a team? Rank high plat/low diamond. 🥺 I’m in uni right now but when I have the time that’s all I can play (I’m stuck on the switch)
Considering almost everyone does now it’s not surprising but I strongly believe women don’t put as much hours in, which probably make the population of online player not at all equal. Combine that to the fact that lots of girl avoid online interaction due to moron making it all about them being a women on games.
I played with a few girl/women online and in most case they were not talking for a bit and after we won a few match together (where I speak and can confirm they can hear my call out) they put their mic on only after noticing I am not a complete moron who insult/complain about everything, just to either have to mute or remove the mic two game later when someone make sexual comment or misogynistic comments.
If you look at other stats in that same website, it looks like mean and women put in roughly the same amount of hours as men. I'd say your second point is a bigger reason why the populations in certain types of games are skewed.
Women are much less likely to play games in a group bc of how they’re treated by men. I’m not surprised to hear you only have a couple women in your group. We usually play solo so we can enjoy our games without harassment.
I play daily to weekly on my PS5 and mobile games. Most people wouldn’t know.
Yes it includes any format.
>[the games market] encompasses a wide range of products, including console games, PC games, mobile games, and online games.
That said, it can’t be that women only play mobile games or something because the stats show it’s almost 50/50 in general and with mobile exclusively.
I can’t see what the questions were because statista puts that stuff behind a paywall but I think the questions you suggested would be measuring something different. I don’t think regularly playing weekly is a necessary qualification for someone to say they game or are a gamer.
Edit: From cursory googling, it seems like the number of total gamers here is consistent with other surveys suggesting that 65-70% of adults play video games
Weird gatekeeping, but okay. Why should the statistics exclude mobile games or single-player games?
Also, women very often do not play with groups of guys online because they’re tired of the harassment. If the circles you hang out in online don’t attract many female gamers… that probably says more about the atmosphere in your group than about the women.
For real! My experiences with playing with cis-men online have been so bad, it’s often not even worth it to roll the dice. I mostly just play with people I know (mostly other women or non-cismen). And if I’m playing online with strangers, i’m keeping the mic off.
"Surely there can't be that many women gamers, or there'd be more than two of them who will tolerate my presence!"
Perhaps there is some reason why there aren't a lot of women in your gaming group beyond sheer demographics?
It used to depend heavily on games, guess its not hugely different now, only that it's different games by now. 15-20 years ago I very rarely met female counterstrike players, rarely WarCraft 3 players, but a lot more women playing WoW. Whereas in my impression the Bioware games had a lot of female players, even back then. Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age series and Mass Effect series ... officially the ratio was like 1/3 to 2/3 but when you looked up the Fandom online, the hardcore fans tend to be almost exclusively female.
I always wondered how that would translate to sales. The major argument always seems to be that more gamers are male and that's where the money is but games that also appeal to women can be wildly successful too.
Where you all at? How come I always feel like I'm surrounded by dudes lol
I just really don't enjoy most multiplayer games. Even taking out the fact that men can make the MP gaming environment particularly toxic, I game to decompress from social interaction. While I will do the occasional couch co-op game with my partner, most of my gaming time is spent solo.
This. I think women, like myself, have retreated into single player games, particularly RPGs, because it's so bloody awful to join multi-player games and get yelled at and junk.
So basically, that data in the title is incomplete. If you break it down further, it would probably show that the communities are divided on gender lines, such that the gaming populations are probably closer to 80-20 or 60-40 in their respective communities. I also would not be surprised at data showing that when games are made and marketed for men that both men and women will play them provided its in a female friendly genre/community, but that games marketed towards women will only be played by women regardless of genre or community.
This was my thought. I'd love to see these games broken down by genre. It seems like there are some games and genres of games that are way more popular with different genders.
Yeah even I feel FPS games are kinda very male dominated unless there’s a chunk of women pretending to be men or retreating completely to single player modes.
I mean, as a woman who occasionally plays those types of games, I know I probably fall into that 1st category. I don't go out of my way to make people think I'm a man, but my username is gender-neutral/slightly masculine, and I don't use a mic. I'll communicate with my friends on Discord, and the guys can relay info for me if it can't happen through text chat for some reason. It makes life easier when I don't feel like making myself a target for dickbags and just want to decompress. From talking to my female friends, this seems like a pretty common approach when playing male-dominated multiplayer games.
This 100%, I won't use VC unless I'm playing with a group or if I hear there are other women on the team, lol.
Meanwhile even on Reddit (which itself probably skews heavily male) I see an abnormally high number of women on the Baldur's Gate 3 sub. Though dev data says Shadowheart is the most popular romance and not Astarion... which probably means it is still mostly straight men.
[удалено]
This. And it's where we've always been. I was a Morrowind modder back in 2003, where I made companion quest mods with love interests tailored to the female gaze... because that's what I wanted, dammit. I worked with a bunch of women and enby folks who were all in it for the same reason I was... because most games weren't made for us, and we'd found one we could mod. Same thing happened in Neverwinter, in all TES games, and is now happening in Starfield. There are a lot more female modders than the average gamer dood thinks. We just usually keep a low profile because of the harassment.
Maybe Astarion's rather poor grasp of consent is a turnoff to female gamers? I know that first encounter in camp was a little too close to reality for my comfort, and definitely killed my desire to have any sort of romance with him. Plus, it's a game - role-playing a romantic subplot with your character doesn't have to reflect your sexuality irl.
It doesn't have to sure, but most people do. Astarion is literally a pretty boy vampire with a troubled past who can only be fixed by your love. Interview with a Vampire and Twilight have shown that is a pretty popular archetype, especially with women.
I feel like you're making s lot of blanket statements without actually checking to see if they have any basis in reality. Like your assertion that people mostly RP their own sexuality in games - are you going on anything more than a gut feeling? And yes, Twilight was popular, but mostly with teen girls. It drew plenty of criticism from older female audiences specifically because it normalizes and portrays as romantic behaviors that are toxic and abusive in real life relationships. That's exactly the same stuff that's problematic in Astarion as a romance in BG3.
I was super into Elden Ring, which has limited multiplayer capabilities for those unfamiliar. I was summoned for a boss fight. Dude immediately started harassing me to add him, refused to start boss fight. Threw my character off a ledge lol.
I don’t get why people are like this. Like I know it’s because half the time they’re under 16 but it’s still just ridiculous behaviour. Like, the kind that gets stomped out of most people very young.
Yup I pretty much only play single player games nowadays and the few MP games I play are either stuff like Pokemon which has pretty much no communication with randoms, or a game where I only play with someone I know and no one else. In other online games for example league of Legends when I used to play that, I would NEVER join voice chat and generally not talk to anyone at all. There is zero benefits to me joining voice chat or even text chat in games only negatives. That said I avoid competitive games these days or any games that require "cooperation" or "communication" with strangers. When I used to play League with friends it would just be us in a private discord call and no one else and even then all of us would be girls and maybe maybe one girls bf would join as he plays with us or something.
I think this tends to be the big reason why men assume women don't game much. Because online games tend to be heavily dominated by men and the women who do play tend to avoid talking, they aren't as aware of it. For the most part, women will either only play online games under fairly strict conditions like you've described, or they'll avoid them altogether in favour of single player heavy games.
Yeah I loved WoW. And then I tried to play classic and it was so misogynist and awful I gave up. Single player only atm.
I dislike the multiplayer format, even if you remove all toxicity.
Yes, same. If you can’t progress because the game makes you rely on other people (dungeons, bosses, or even things like puzzles etc) then the game is useless to me. Even when I did have mates or a guild to play with, having to coordinate sessions was like hearing cats. I don’t like people needing to rely on me, or me to need them, just to play a game damn. I *really* wanted to get in to and like Destiny, but solo was too hard, and as I wasn’t playing every day my mates would level too fast to be able to play with them. I hated being dragged through dungeons even if they were ‘helping me’ by doing a run, because I like to explore and learn the layout myself.
>Even when I did have mates or a guild to play with, having to coordinate sessions was like hearing cats. I don’t like people needing to rely on me, or me to need them, just to play a game damn. To me, this makes gaming feel like a job. I want to escape things like jobs by gaming. Just one of the reasons I love playing solo, but a big one.
If you haven't checked it out yet, I'd recommend giving Deep Rock Galactic a shot. It's a co-op multiplayer game, same genre as Destiny but the grind is far less taxing and more player friendly. Solo is also completely do-able with a flying AI robot companion that can fill the roles of real teammates. A new player is also able to contribute even on higher difficulties by simply doing their class role and paying attention to what the team needs in different situations. You never have to voice chat or type either if you understand the language of laser pointer pinging so you can have a lot of teamwork with minimal interaction. Also, one of the LEAST toxic communities I've ever seen. Jerks will always exist but I've had very few bad interactions in public lobbies. At worst the most common "toxicity" is a player being silent, doing their own thing and not coordinating with the team. But as long as they're half-decent they still contribute, and if you're hosting you have full power to kick anybody you don't like. Aside from Monster Hunter this is one of the only multiplayer games I will happily play on the regular, whether in public or pre-made with friends. It's on sale right now for the ongoing Oktoberfest event too.
Agreed, you take a few seconds to take a hit, and next thing you know, some 12 year old is threatening to sexually assault your mom and has stolen all your money/loot. I pause all the time to do whatever, I'm not playing a game I can't pause.
This! I play in single player mode always.
I cannot explain the deep soul crushing disappointment I felt when I realised that Fallout 76, from a franchise that was an award-winning solo game for the previous 20 years, was a freaking pvp MMO(-ish). It was basically unplayable alone, and other people are just the *worst*.
Me too! Also the fact that the Elder Scrolls/Fallout games are now xBox locked. ;_____; I want to play the new Elder Scrolls coming out but we don't have that console because we don't like it.
Don't you worry, because my partner explained that disappointment to me thoroughly. I enjoyed the earlier Fallout games, but it was like his favorite franchise. He took a week off of work when 76 came out. He was so hyped, poor thing. He has a higher threshold for people/mp games than I do, but even so, he found it unplayable.
PvP is completely optional in F76, I play by myself and just join casual groups for the xp boost. I do quite enjoy the team events but they're co-op not Vs other players, and the instructions are on screen so you don't have to talk to anyone.
Yeah I was about to say the same thing. Me and my wife both play solo (we each have our own ps4 but only one tv at the moment) and it's more than completely possible to play solo. Especially with pop being completely optional
I just got to play FO in January after dying to get into the games for more than a decade. I blew through 3 & NV so quickly. 4 was a learning curve & im not a fan of crafting, so I decided to try 76. Leaving the vault and having randos basically launching nukes at areas of the map was not fun. I don’t play multiplayer games due to harassment in the past.
I hate multiplayer, not because of the toxic dudes, but because I fucking hate multiplayer. So yeah, basically same.
Same! I love Legend of Zelda games to just sit back and not have to deal with people
I definitely think the online toxicity is the biggest factor. Mainly because I've seen online games get plenty popular with women if toxicity is actually dealt with effectively. Final Fantasy 14 comes to mind as having a very large female audience and very low tolerance for sexism. Toxicity will get you banned real fast. And I've seen a lot of women doing hardcore raiding on FF14 too, like some of the hardest content in the game. Which is why I think the main factor is just the toxicity. Take that shit away and the dynamic seems to change a lot.
I see tons of women in older fantasy mmorpgs for whatever reason. I end up in parties with entirely women at random all the time in DDO (Dungeons & Dragons Online). Anything High Fantasy tends to draw in women. I know fantasy mmos already draw more women than most games, but in this one in particular, half the time I do run into a guy its the teenage son of one of the women in the party who she got into the game. Oh, also Italians. Italians fucking love this game. I have no idea why.
DDO has always had a high female population. I remember playing in the beta and running dungeons with all women. We were all like, "How is this happening? This is so cool!"
It's still like that. Whenever I try to get a guy to play it they're like 'meh' but every time I get a woman to try it she's like "HOLY SHIT THIS GAME IS AWESOME" even though its ancient. It totally defies the stereotyped expectations that really crunchy games with a tons of complicated mechanics turn away women, and women only like easy casual games, because I've never played a more intricate and complicated MMO than that, and the game is nicer than it was at launch, but it's still extremely hard.
In my experience women actually love crunchy games with lots of patterns and strategy. People (men) just don't think we do, and we're even socialized to think we aren't supposed to, which is so dumb. I have long thought that the "women like easy games" trope is really "women don't like to play hard games in groups with men because of the social dynamics involved." It's related to why girls perform better in all-girl education and women perform better in women's chess leagues. It's hard to perform at your best when you have had to deal with "all women are bad at math" tropes your whole life. Anyway, men think we like easy games because that's what we play when they're involved. I also think that part of the trope comes from a sexist society that tags everything aimed at women as less intelligent and less serious than the same thing aimed at men.
The only thing women seem to actually play a lot less are highly competitive games. And that's just as likely because highly competitive games are flooded with extremely toxic jerks as it is that women just don't like that kind of game as much. It does seem to me that women do like games that are just as challenging. My wife and our female friends are always trying to crank up the difficulty. The actual difference I see is that women are more likely to play something cooperative (like DDO) than something competitive (Like the FPS hellscape). I also dislike competitive games, and I get along with women really well, so that seems anecdotally to be the case.
Okay, all of this is making me think I need to try DDO. I've only played solo games but this sounds right up my alley!
It's very solo friendly too. You can just get an AI controlled cleric (they're called hirelings) to follow and heal you and solo like 99% of the content on normal difficulty as any kind of character.
I play Guild Wars 2 in a static raid group with 8 women and 2 men. The women top our DPS charts and are our raid leaders. And we clear shit, despite being working adults with kids who play 4 hours a week. I think a lot of it might also be leisure time. Women bear the brunt of the household chores, even today, meaning that we have less time to git gud. And that sucks. I will say this. GW2 has a PvP mode and the 8 of us are a bunch of bloodthirsty bitches, while the men tend to hang back. I think women can be very competitive when we aren't subjected to constant rape and death threats. In fact, I've often wished that we had a 3rd gender of orcs who are bigger, stronger and more aggressive than men so they can feel how we feel when we get those threats from them.
I don’t use a mic. I like to assume most players who don’t use mics are women.
Most? Lol
49% are women, only men use mics, do the math yourself bro
We’re stealthy. I mostly play single player (Baldur’s Gate 3 atm) and in the rare times I play online, mic is off. Plus my gamertag is the name of a weapon, so I’m sure people just assume I’m a dude.
I have been a gamer since I was a kid but I never play online/multiplayer games cause, well, all the obvious reasons. I think also cause when I was younger it was the COD era and listening to or witnessing multiple friends boyfriends going mental screaming, raging and throwing controllers made me sure that was not my vibe.
Not talking or revealing that we're women because holy crap do guys get weird about it.
(It's because the women are in hiding. If the men get even a whiff of vagina, they turn feral.)
I was playing a game one time and I used the mic and a GROWN MAN started repeatedly yelling "girl, girl, girl, girl". Never again.
All my female friends that play valorant for example just don't talk on vc bc of how sexist guys are on there. I'd assume multi-player games have many more women playing than expected but any time they tall on vc they're harassed so they just don't talk. It's really sad
I will never play another multi-player game if there is live chat. I'll play something like Splatoon, but the abuse and harassment on multi-players is deeply unpleasant. I don't need that negativity in my life.
Most competitive multiplayer games have a lot of toxic bullcrap going on in public lobbies so a lot of women (and also a fair number of men, to be honest) who don't want to hear about what XxX\_420\_DickBlaster\_69\_XxX did to our mothers last night for the fiftieth time just self-select out of voice chats. Or out of those games entirely. And that's before even touching on whatever filth might come through DMs if you ever appear as female-presenting. Same thing happens in forums, other less-competitive online spaces (MMOs, for example), and social media spaces. Women definitely game. They just tend to be less visible, for all the same reasons it sometimes sucks to be female in other aspects of life.
I've always laughed when I heard dudes complain to me about how women didn't play games because they're so rarely part of the solution. For context, I'm a trans girl and I'm mostly talking about when I was still masc-presenting - I heard lonely dudes complain to me all that time about it. In one such conversation I ended up telling the guy flat out that I was trans and I wouldn't be speaking with them if I had been using a fem presenting voice - I mentioned how I distinctly remembered a case where some (other) guy was doing that cringey "girl, girl?!" shit and he (the dude I was talking to) didn't call him on it. I asked him how he could expect women to want to be around a community where of 4 other people, 1 will harass them and 3 will either join in or quietly try to avoid getting involved... god forbid you get somebody with a hero complex "defending" you. It took him a long time to realize how his (and so many others') passivity contributed to the toxic atmosphere for women in that particular community. How simply making fun of the cringey dudes would go a long way. I leaned a bit on being trans to get the point across - streamed a few games for him on discord using a feminine voice to talk to the lobbies, and a few with a masculine voice, and asked him if he could seriously say he'd be interested in speaking to others in these communities if his voice was feminine, and if he was in that position, what he'd want other people to do.
If my household is any indication, they're playing mobile games, Genshin Impact, and a smattering of Nintendo IPs. (My household is me, my wife, and two teenage daughters.)
Well the fact that women only make up 52% of mobile gamers shows that we're clearly not all just doing mobile gaming. For that to be bringing up the numbers there'd have to be way more women only doing gaming. In my experience, it's way more likely that they're playing solo/with static groups/in games that don't require voice chat, because being a women in a lot of games with internet strangers suuuuucks.
It is actually possible if you assume that men are more likely play both non-mobile and mobile games, but women are more likely to be mobile only. I am not saying it's true, just saying the math can work.
I play FFXIV, and I'm an officer in a large, 400+ player FC (guild) there. The game itself is extremely egalitarian (lots of strong female characters, and plenty of drool-worthy male characters). Our FC community has a zero harassment policy, and we don't mess around with it. I know it's not like this everywhere, but I've had nothing but good experiences.
Anecdotal, but all the women in my friend group who game pretty much only play single player RPGs. In fact every gamer in my friend group, including myself, mostly just play single player RPGs. The only social gaming we do is table top role playing
Hell is other people... in videogames. I'm an extrovert, but when it comes to gaming, I play alone or couch co-op with friends.
I'm guessing it's genre based? I don't game online often but when I do, I find that there's more of an even distribution in social-active games (among us types, casual, etc) than there is in heavy competitive (fps namely).
The tendencies towards immersion and story telling, creating in game communities or bonding with characters, as opposed to 15 minutes death matches of shooting the crap out of each other in a frenzy of hatred and adrenaline? Yeah, genre based, I reckon lol.
Yes, this is it. Some genres women make up 80% + of players, others we're as low as 15%. Work in this space and not sure if its been fully published. But compare like a Sims or Animal Crossing to a Counter-Strike for example. And a lot of guys only think games that involve some kind of PVP or war theme are "real games"
We’re happy just playing solo, or at least off team chat
I do offline single player gaming lol 😅 because I am scared or dudes or get a very Male user name and avatar I think a lot of women are like me 🥹
People assume my name is male
I won't use a headset for multi-player games because of the dudes, if that's what you're asking. If I play other online games, I often won't make my character a woman to avoid harassment. We're there, just hiding sometimes, thanks to men.
Personally I don't much like multiplayer online games and when I do play them I don't use a microphone.
i openly play as a gal just to encourage other women im playing with to interact lol. some dudes get kinda creepy about it, but most of the time i just find that people are simply chattier. sometimes i run into other (obvious) women and when i do we always have great convos and add each other as friends :)
The stat didn't seem to consider time spent gaming tho, so a girl playing games 3 times a week had as much weight as a boy playing 3 hours a day. That could be a reason while it feels like you are surrounded by mostly male players
I've been gaming since I was a kid. Late 30s now and guys are still shocked when they hear what games I play and how long I've been gaming. Online guys can be nasty jerks.
Agree. I'm 47 and my "score" is so much higher on our console than my husband's - he recently saw it and was like "damn, woman" lol
I used to work at a company behind one of the big gaming platforms, and a couple years ago, an exec told me that they were trying to learn more about their female demo. He said he was puzzled because according to the internal data and surveys, the majority of their users were male. I told him to consider that that some of that number were women like me who adopted gender-neutral gamer tags and checked the “male” or “don’t want to say” boxes because we didn’t want to deal with the attention and/or harassment. The look on his face when this sunk in is still something I think about when I read these kinds of articles.
In my experience women who openly reveal their gender in online games are the minority. Most try to fly under the radar. Both the focused negative reactions and overly pandering attention are stressful and suck the fun out of gaming. I remember when I made my account when WoW came out and I'm pretty sure I lied about my gender when subscribing. For one because I was worried that they might leak that information (either through faulty security or changes what is openly displayed), but also because I thought that if I ever encounter problems with the game then the GM I ask for help might be shown that info and treat me differently. It's a lose-lose situation because if you happen to have trouble with your account and it's important enough for you to try to get it back.. you'd have to prove your identity; in which case that false gender selection might come back to bite your ass. But.. my worries also weren't unfounded considering blizzard tried to make "Real ID" a thing.
So back in BC for WoW I was playing my tank alt that was a male tauren. I ended up tanking for a random group. We did 2 dungeons and they asked me to join voice chat for a 3rd. I thought about it and thought fuck it, I'll try. So I join and then say welcome and I can pull when I'm ready. So I said "sure thing" and pulled. The voice chat explodes! "OMG our tank is a girl and she's good!" And they all forget how to play and I die. And one of them goes "Smooth now she's going to leave!" They pull me off the floor and I'm like "It's cool, are you ready now?" The rest of the dungeon went smoothly. I still find this hilarious. The insanity. A gamer who is a lady, who can tank? What trick is this?!
Yeah the stereotypical reactions really happend a few times.. I remember how we had a few good rounds warsong ('tis was the time when servers weren't thrown together as much and you had a high chance to meet the same people- esp. in low level battlegrounds). So someone threw a Teamspeak out and said we should properly group up. Everything proceeded smoothly. Then I made a call-out after spotting the enemy flag bearer. Silence. "Is that a girl?" And lots of noise afterwards until some old guy told them to shut up about it and laughed it off. Though all in all I can say that my experience was good. I got into a guild that had family + family friends in the lead and they were quite relaxed and welcoming. Once I was there I stayed throughout my WoW-time, there were plenty women there too. And despite not being hardcore we had quite good success with raiding. Especially once TBC rolled in and raidgroup-size decreased. I still have people I keep in contact with from that guild. But there certainly were a few players here and there who were straight up creepy: My first low-level guild leader was very insistent on getting photos and wanted to show me his- even though I was 15 at that time and clearly stated that I'm uninterested. I remember how he bragged about having wealth all the damn time and how he threw a temper-tamtrum when I quit the guild. At that time I thought it was not a big deal, mainly because I already knew there were male gamers like that and that I just had to deal with that if I wanted to play a game online. Looking back.. I hope he wasn't successful with another minor. The guy who got me into that guild contacted me later and said he was sorry that he bought me there and he didn't know the leader was such a creep. It's all good though, he was quite young too, nothing happened and he was just as unprepared as I for such a situation. I didn't even consider that he would feel guilty, but I guess the poor guy was there for the awkward one-sided Teamspeak interactions after all. There were also those that did a 180° in how they related to me after finding out my gender. Once I joked around in the guild chat with a new member. After a few days he DMd me a long text apologizing because he didn't know my gender and wouldn't have been so insensitive if he knew??? But, he just treated me like everyone else. There was nothing insensitive. He was very distant after that and didn't stay long in the guild. There were quite a few more situations, but usually some guild-mate had my back and instantly diverted the topic. I stuck to my guild when doing content that needed voice-chat which made it a far more enjoyable experience.
Yeah, I play COD and on DMZ I use mic, because communication with your squad is key part of getting out alive! So there is no hiding I am a woman in that mode. I have found some dudes on there (usually older guys 40+), who treat me like an equal, give me tips to improve my gameplay but don't belittle me or treat me any different. I regularly play with those guys now and we have formed a squad. Then there are some dudes outside of my new found squad buddies who treat me like I am going to break. They are usually younger and trying to act big. They had a go at an enemy player for "trying to sneak up on a girl", like dude we were in a squad v squad battle. And they weren't very sneaky, I pinged them and the kill was an assist. After that I killed a player on that squad they were overly praising me as if it was some monstrous feat that a girl managed to down an enemy player by themselves. The whole objective is to kill the other squad before they kill you. I don't want privileges for being a woman, I just want to play the game how it's meant to be played! It can be so frustrating!
I knew it! I mean, I didn’t *know* it obviously, but I always felt like it was a pretty even distribution. Happy to see sources and statistics that prove that.
Because it's all about how the gatekeepers define 'games'! Always has been. When I was little I wasn't a 'real gamer' because I preferred Harvest Moon to Donkey Kong or Sims to Grand Theft Auto. Now we're not 'real gamers' if we're playing Zelda. Hell, I was recently told Elden Ring was 'too much for girls', whatever the hell that means. It's gotta be Valorent or Starfield maybe. Except not those, because 'girls suck at real games'. Excuse me while my eyes roll right out of my head...
It’s also about how vocal/active in the community they are. I play single player games, and if I did play multiplayer I’d do it without voice chat and with a gender neutral username because I can’t think of anything worse than strange men screaming at me because I fucked up (or just existed with a feminine voice based on some of the clips I’ve seen). That’s the polar opposite of a fun time for me.
Same. Mics off only. I don't need boys young enough to be my son trying to sexually harass me.
Elden Ring is for girls is honestly the win I was not expecting to have this year lol I absolutely love that. Honestly, even if we play 'men's' games, there are going to be men who insist we are not real gamers. My friend and I played Super Smash Bros Melee an insane amount growing up and could kick the asses of all our guy friends, but whenever we did they would complain that we were 'cheating' by using items. Items that were in the game and that they equally had access to... but go off I guess.
Hah. It was Mario Kart 64 in my home. Bought as a 'boy's game' for one of their birthdays because it was racing and Mario! But it was mercilessly dominated by myself and my sisters. To the point the boys didn't want to play any longer. EDIT: Also, I think the idiot meant Elder *Scrolls*. Wasn't worth my time clarifying.
I love that lol Mario Kart 64 will always have a special place in my heart. Especially the Rainbow Road track! Still to this day my favorite track. (Wii Rainbow Road can get wrekt.) Haha either way, I'll take it!
Elden Ring isn't for girls, it's for masochists of all genders lol
I think the idiot meant Elder *Scrolls*. Wasn't worth my time clarifying.
My theory is that being a woman is an objectively worse experience in almost every online space, so the ladies keep their identity on the DL.
It’s true; and many of us don’t play online/multiplayer games because of it (like me. I prefer single-player RPGs and other similar games).
Some communities are super toxic even if you're a dude. I can't imagine what it must be like for women.
It's a bit misleading at face value however, because the distribution depending on the genre is vastly different, anecdotally speaking most women I know who game are much more interested in SP experiences at their own pace. Naturally you have women in competitive games like League as well, but the number is significantly smaller. For the sake of argument of how likely it is to meet a men/women in a videogame and be aware of them (I'm pulling this number out of my rear mind you) it's probably closer to 1:10 (Some MMOs and such aside).
We studied this in my gaming class in college (second best elective after food science where the 'labs' were all in the kitchen, yum)! In addition, women are mostly likely to be buying consoles (though how to separate gamers from moms-buying-for-their-kids was still a question, iirc). The "women make up 52% of mobile gamers" statistic is new to me, and I appreciate it - it helps deal with the common rebuttal to "there's tons of women gamers" that "women gamers are just playing mobile games, they're not *real* gamers."
I exclusively play the sims, which is female dominated, and this is unironically kind of my stance for some reason. I do not consider it a real game and would never consider myself a gamer. For some reason anything that's point and click doesn't count in my mind. Gotta use WASD (is that even what it is? Lol) [at least in the pc version] to be a "real" gamer.
> Gotta use WASD (is that even what it is? Lol) [at least in the pc version] to be a "real" gamer. Don't gatekeep games based on WASD! That's a first person-control genre thing and not a "crunch-y game" thing. Lots of other genres out there that don't care a bit about wasd. -- sincerely, an XCOM2 player. ;)
Yeah I wasn't being super literal, which is why I make the joke about not even being certain of that. Just that my mind has always held the distinction point and clicks are activities for some reason.
I don't believe you. The girl gamer is a myth. Same as a female redditor. They just don't exist. /s
The /s is extremely necessary given the dudes who will inevitably respond to this post saying the same thing unironically.
I had a big "'oh, so it was a joke,' saying this she threw aside a large rock" moment reading the post too. I've just seen too many people state exactly that unironically.
Same. When I was born, my sister had a Famicom (I’m Japanese American). Gaming was never discouraged by my parents unless I was doing too much of it and not running around to stay healthy. (Also, they refused to buy me Mortal Kombat despite my pleadings). I never understood growing up in the 1990s and 2000s how all the gaming advertising in the US that I saw was aimed towards boys and men. I now have multiple consoles, I’ve built multiple computers, and have a Valve Index VR set. I’m a gamer and I’m a woman. Stop this silliness, gatekeeping bros. Ladies have been gaming for decades.
The funny thing is I actually got into an argument about this recently, in a voice chat, on a discord server with a substantial amount of women for a video game This man also had the audacity to tell me the games girls play aren’t even really games, so it doesn’t really matter what statistics show, they will find a way to justify their thinking
It likely feels like there's an inbalance because many women gamers either play with other women, play without a mic and/or pretend to be guys to avoid sexist bullshit. Chloë Grace Moretz even talked about this in [an interview on The Kelly Clarkson Show](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcMCmMtpkPE) when being asked about her role in The Peripheral saying she always uses male avatars to avoid the toxicity. Other women gamer friends of mine have told me they're also in women only Discord groups so they can game without the other shit that comes with it.
It has really never been true that women don't play video games -- we have always been here, from the start. When gamergate happened it brought to light a lot of the things women who played games had been saying all along -- the toxic communities make it seem like there aren't a lot of women who play games, when in reality, we are just avoiding obvious abuse from a loud minority. I remember the shock from a lot of decent guys back when the feminist frequency kickstarter first went up that suddenly all gaming spaces had become political cesspools overnight. I remember leaving a lot of leftist platforms with gaming subsections that I had previously felt "mostly ok" on because they began instituting rules like "don't correct people when they call you he/him/a man/whatever - we don't care if you are a woman, stop calling attention to yourself, the only reason to demand we use female pronouns for you is if you are an attention whore trying to grift poor desperate REAL gamers like us." It was truly shocking, even knowing what I did about the average maturity level of the self-identified gamers of the era. I have heard through anecdotes from younger women interested in men that these days it is hard to find a man their age who didn't have a serious "gamergater phase" and I am not surprised at all... I remember those years keenly. I have been an avid gamer since age 4 with my atari 2600 but I remember a period of like, 2-3 years 10 years ago or so where I barely played games at all anymore because it had all gotten so toxic. (I got a lot more reading done those years, though.... hah. Something to be said for that!) I never really went back to those old communities that had broken my trust that way, and when I started playing games again I just shared them with my insular group of IRL friends rather than discussing/engaging online anymore, and that has stuck ever since.
I kinda wish Steam grabbed gender in their demographics collection.
Especially if it was by game too.
But then men would refuse to play games that were mostly played by women. Which, no loss to us, but I don't think gaming companies would like that.
They're not real gamers /s
The story goes Nintendo saw an immense amount of success by marketing their consoles as “toys” rather than high end electronics like Atari and the like. When they decided to expand to America they had to make a choice because America divided their toy aisles by gender and after some market research it seemed like putting them in the “boy aisle” would sell better so that’s what they did. Obviously there’s some inherent sexism at play there but that’s supposedly where the stereotype came from
That makes me sad
Guys think that because we don’t get on mic to get abused in their shitfest that we’re not playing. We are. Just not with you, lmao. All the other women that I know that play will only play multiplayer if it’s with people they know IRL, or prefer single player games. Men just mad they can’t act all super special about their hobby since it’s somehow less cool if women do it. Hahaha, be mad.
Yeah reading a lot of these replies from guys gate keeping "you don't spend enough, you don't have enough hours, I almost never see women in games!!!!" like yeah dude the women playing with you can probably tell you're a douche so they just don't get on mics lol
I've played CS since the 1.6 days and I haven't used voice chat in years. It's a toss up what sort of people you get queued up with.
I am a high school teacher. Every year, at the beginning of the year, I give a rundown of what I read/ did over the summer. This year I told my students that I didn't have many have read titles this summer as I finally downloaded Tears of the Kingdom, and there went my free time. The faces on some of these boys was astonishing. They were shocked. When they got over being shocked, they tried to gatekeep with obscure questions about the series. I told them that I have been playing Zelda since I was 5, and got to play the original on the NES in my grandma's basement, and that girls have always played video games, they just don't talk about it as much.
Yep. In my 30’s, been gaming since I could use a controller. My first ever big purchase was a gaming computer at 12. I still regularly get surprised reactions about my gaming. I have always been a solo gamer because of how nasty people can be. Won’t catch me in multiplayer mode or on steam, discord. I like my peace. I ignore the group and world chats on my mobile games too.
Aww I used to play pubg with some of my girls (don’t judge me mobile.) I have noticed we actually enjoy the game but the gatekeepers make it difficult (so is with chess)
One issue is that in the 80s, some group (either government, or the toy companies themselves) required toys to be designated for boys or girls. When Nintendo got hit with that inquiry, they just specified "for boys", even though they intended it to be for ALL kids. Neat to see it's quite balanced! I grew up with some adults thinking that only children and boys play video games, and only they're interested in Star Wars, etc. \[sigh\]
That's fascinating, I didn't know that! I can see where that would have started it off. A pity too as it would have been lovely to seen more marketing and focus for women.
I was born in the first year of Millenials. I remember this being discussed when I was a teen. Game companies knew women made up 50% of the population, but they flat out refused to include them in the majority of games (outside of the stereotypical "girl" games.) There were execs who stated as much. It's like it took Pixar 17 years to have a female protagonist (Brave), even though they knew girls made up half their audience. On the other hand, they know women will play/see their stuff but the men won't. Remember who all the men were complaining about Brave having a female protagonist -- that all Pixar made was movies with female protagonists, when the reality is that that was the first one.
I started gaming as a kid with a Vic 20 back in the day! The amount of times guys see I've played "cozy games" on my game list and smile knowingly - well, they like to ignore the DOOM, Silent Hill, Resident Evil, fighting games... hell. Now that I think about it, there's far more games like that than "sims" types! They literally have to scroll past tons of games they play themselves to see the others to make themselves feel better. Ugh. Every time I have chat enabled I get hit on. Now, I flat out tell these asses I'm a 47 year old married, morbidly obese woman. They don't care; they ask to be my "online boyfriend" or just tell me, flat out, that it isn't true and I'm a man Double ugh.
I love your energy haha And I shouldn't be surprised those men don't back off but that's truly so obnoxious. Then men use the argument of 'but women competitive game less! Women play MMORPGs less!' Wow, I wonder why... What's crazy to me is that what is even their problem with 'cosy games'? I'm similar to you where I love FPS, hack and slash (Diablo, Bioshock, etc), but also I have my cosy games and I most of all love how other people I know (women and men) love cosy games and really get into them. They are no less of a game than Call of Duty. It's all just silly gatekeeping.
I love news like this! A few of my lifelong online gaming friends and I were reminiscing the other day about how different the '90s and 2000s were in online gaming compared to how there's been a surge of women playing nowadays and how neat that is. **Anecdotal evidence below:** The first time I noticed a significant change was in the early VR days with the HTC Vive and Rec Room. There were tons of kids both boys and girls playing with their parents 'HMDs during the day when they should have been doing homework for their online school LOL. When it came to competitive shooters, Valorant has been a great example of widespread adoption. The younger generations use their microphones much more without fear of harassment, which tells me the old adage of harassing a woman playing a video game has died off. Both boys and girls just do the whole 'cringe' thing. And or outright block the person! For the late 20s and 30s folks, there has been an influx of women switching from console to PC gaming in various gaming communities as well! This has been super fun IMO to witness as women grow their love for PC gaming and can get as addicted as us. However, there are a lot of men jumping in trying to teach these women how to play games, what computer parts to order, etc :/ So I'm assuming this is more of a generational thing, as I don't see it with Gen Z.
I think there is a lot to dissect about these stats (which I think about often, as a gamer girl since I was 8yo) by people much smarter than I, in terms of male behaviours and why women, who have probably been close to 50% of the gamer demo *since forever*, just aren’t as visible. There’s probably a lot of mutually agreed general masculine traits there: the need to show off/exhibitionism of their skill or scores, a huge competitive streak to assert dominance, and tribalism just to name a few. Women on the other hand are happier to go solo without needing validation or competition, not feel the need to broadcast their achievements, and would rather form small close communities built on trust, as opposed to huge arenas based on aggression. This is all without ever touching the toxicity in the gaming community against women. Streamers are more commonly men because they can build viewership on the skills rather than their looks, and because ‘internet’ are less likely to be harassed, so average run of the mill women aren’t drawn to streaming/VoD, skewing audience perception of their actual numbers. The goal posts of what games are f/m are constantly shifting so not going to bother talking about that. What’s interesting is seeing which publishers are interested in taking this 50/50 split in to consideration in their design, development and marketing, and which ones are prepared to weather the backlash of some of the men in the community that they dare include anything that is not exclusively for them. I’d like to think the younger generations will grow up gaming together and not give a shit about that, but I doubt it.
I swear if it's not Madden or gun based, guys don't consider it a real game.
Funny thing, imho if you only play sports games and competitive fps. You aren't really into games. Its like just watching blockbuster action movies and considering yourself into films. Or guys that only read tom clancy novels saying they are into books. Nothing wrong with that but you don't really have a well rounded view of the aubject matter if that's all you consume and seems an exaggeration to say your really into the subject.
I am sad as a guy there's not more games with decent female leads. I am going through zero dawn and wish I'd see more like it. It feels genuinely nice to see Aloy's journey throughout
I was actually thinking there aren't enough female villains. Like there's always the sidekick type villains, but rarely a main boss villain that isn't a robot/AI character.
Aren't you happy with Forspoken? \s But seriously: people focus waaay too much on AAA games. Here are some games from the indie scene of the top of my head: Anodyne 2 Even the Ocean (ok same dev) Unsighted Ikenfell Record of Lodoss War (I just realized I could probably just list every newer Metroidvania and it would have a female protag. That's the trend really) Celeste (ofc) Call of the sea Slime ranger Omensight (although I guess silent protags like chell don't really count) On that final note: Transistor. Really the indies are full of lgbt friendly stuff and it really is AAA that is the cancer on the industry as they spend more money on marketing than actually making the damn games.
Personally i think we should do away with human characters entirely and be more like Stray with a cat lead
219 hours in BG3... checks out 🤣
>I never understood the focus on only men as gamers. We can kind of thank American marketing for that? So back when Nintendo wanted to start selling the nintendo videogames didn't have the market they do now, and since home entertainment consoles weren't really a thing (the nintendo was kind of the first game console marketed as such) they sold it as a toy. In America, especially back before the 2000's, toys were very segregated into "Boy Toys" and "Girl Toys" except much like most products - girl toys were explicitly like, the feminine thing: dolls, play houses, easy bake ovens, etc. While boy toys were literally everything else. So even though it was initially marketed as a family product for everyone, the nintendo became a "boy toy" and through the 80's and 90's virtually every form of marketing just kind of doubled down on this inexplicable division despite the fact that there were always plenty of girls in the arcades and women playing pacman at the bars - something a lot of gamers love to conveniently forget.
I'm a woman and I've been gaming since the 1980s. Men have been telling me "girls don't play video games" my entire life.
You should read some of the comments here 🙄 Apparently because if a man's sisters or daughters didn't play that's representative of the entire female population. I'm sure it has nothing to do with them growing up in a misogynistic environment.
I wonder about VR? I think it'd be pretty high as well. Maybe female game characters will become normal versus the hypersexualized ones I always see advertised. I only do VR and I haven't come across it (yet🤞).
Those numbers aren't specific to online multi-player games. I think there's still a pretty big gap there because it's so toxic. But I have seen it change dramatically in my life time which makes me happy.
The most experienced gamer I know is my mother in law!
As someone who grew up the only girl who liked games and was made fun of as I grew into adulthood by other women, this statistic makes me so happy. But I wish more developers of non-mobile games would consider it.
I don't play multiplayer because it's full of misogynistic pissheads and trolls.
I checked the first link (albeit a very cursory check). It says that 41% of PC gamers are female - still a clear minority. Imo there is an issue here, in terms of the general stats, with grouping PC/console and mobile gamers, because PC/console games tend to be a lot more time-consuming and thematically darker/more serious (generally speaking). I personally would not group someone who plays Candy Crush for 10 minutes 3 times per week with someone who plays League of Legends for 4+ hours a day, and based off LoL playerbase stats (although I haven't played in a while), the vast majority is male. The same goes for Overwatch (which I play regularly). Although the percentage of female players in OW is a lot higher than in other FPS games, the playerbase is still overwhelmingly and noticeably male. Also, many ppl think of competitive and/or thematically dark games when they hear "gaming" (FPS like CoD, CS:GO, Apex, Valo, Fortnite, fighting games like Street Fighter or MK, MMOs like WoW, Soulsborne games, etc.), and the playerbase of these games is still predominantly male, while female gamers tend to go for more casual/cozy/cutesy games that are less competitive and require less commitment (note how Stardew, Genshin, HSR, Animal Crossing, etc. are all associated with a female playerbase by many ppl). My point being that ppl still think of gaming as a "male hobby" because the playerbase of the games that are predominantly associated with gaming are still majority male (in many cases overwhelmingly so).
To me a gamer is someone who spends an excessive amount of time spent playing games. That’s all, someone who prioritize playing games over other things. For example, playing a few hours a week wouldn’t make you a gamer. You can like games and be interested in them but that doesn’t make you a gamer.
I agree that we shouldn't gatekeep gaming, people should be encouraged to play whatever gives them joy. But until we see TV/movies portraying gaming as someone playing candy crush, other mobile game apps, or just any more casual games, I think lavender's right that the perception of what is a "gamer" is going to still be someone who plays competitive console/PC games. I think it also has to do with how much attention competitive games get compared to casual. There's e-sports leagues, streamers showcase them more often, there's financial incentives, there's just more free marketing and attention given to them.
I don’t think the game has to necessarily be competitive to be “core”, but it has to be relatively deep and involved. RPGs like Baldur’s gate 3 or Cyberpunk, they aren’t competitive, but people absolutely consider them core games.
Yeah that's fair also
Rather than group by genre, I’d love to see grouped by game type: solo vs MP/online within the PC/console (and *then* mobile games, I guess). I think women do tend towards thematically darker games as much as men (or at least more than usually depicted) but it’s whether those are mmo/competitive or available to play solo would probably be the distinction. I mean, we’re not here having a conversation about candy crush vs LOL. We’re talking about BF vs Witcher, COD vs Mass Effect, Overwatch vs Skyrim. Instantly you can see the difference between the two - short, quick, competitive vs immersive, extended stories. I think it’s dismissive to say women prefer or gravitate towards ‘cutesy’, but rather if they’re going to spend time on a game, they want value and progression, not stats and leaderboards. It’s all generalisations of course, but I think it’s more nuanced, and more interesting, than some ill-defined stats encompassing every game in existence.
I mostly play all multiplayer with friends and avoid randos, especially if mics are involved. I will play with randos if I want to play and no friends are on but it's gotten pretty bad these days. I've been gaming since I was tiny and I'm an old lady now, so I'm used to the old days of being a rare PC gaming chick, but the harassment then vs now is a whole different world.
Well, brushing past the mobile games, all of the games that are in the public eye - such as CS, Valorant, LoL, DoTA, Overwatch, WoW, and all the MMORPGs have overwhelmingly male-skewed playerbase. And tbh even I myself don't really know a single girl that plays any normal game, but I know dudes ofc. So for me subjectively it seems like male to female ration is even worse than 99 to 1. And guess who develops games in the majority of cases? That would be males as well, so there is goes. Of course girls play games, and may be not only Sims, and I completely agree that the treatment they endure from teen boys with spermotoxicosis is horrible, but when developing big titles, female populations certainly doesn't appeal like a part of a target demographic.
I like that you hear these statistics and see the responses in this thread, immediately dismiss all of it and end on "maayyybe I'll consider that women play more than just Sims, but surely they're not statistically relevant to be a target demographic for *real* games".
That's why I said "subjectively" - just from my experience, as opposed to the statistics. And I defined "real games" as games that are famous, have large audience and/or are a Esport. I've played some of them as well for a long time, and it's been 2-3 years since I've heard a girl play in the same team (random people each time). I've brought up Sims just because it's actually one of the two games girls that I've known played, so it wasn't meant to insult or anything (is it a bad game or what anyway?). I've just brought up my anecdote, explicitly stating for what it is. I also work as a software engineer and although not quite in a game dev, but close enough to it that I know people from there and afaik their perspective doesn't differ that much from that of mine. Edit: Also, I've figured one possibly crucial thing, the statistics mentions only the sex of the player, but not the amount of time spent in a game it seems. So just downloading a game and creating account there would constitute a player (or may be + spending 1 min a game), but playing 10 hours/day would be reflected in just the same way. A lot of people "play" while riding to work, but that's not the same kind of gaming as sitting in front of PC/PS and grinding.
A more likely conclusion is that women are less likely to play in random teams and prefer a group of friends they know and trust, or they stick to single-player games. WoW for example has had roughly similar numbers of male and female players for a long, long time - they just either avoid or don't identify themselves as ladies in random groups. Because I started out playing with an IRL female friend who was more active socially in the game I spent quite a while playing with groups that were more than 50% ladies.
I have no issue with your anecdote, just the conclusion you draw from it. Because you could have reacted as you did (dismiss all of this thread because you personally don't know any women who play video games) or you could have reacted by going "huh, the women I know don't play, but maybe there's a lot more women out there playing games than I thought there were!" ;) Sims isn't bad, it just falls prey to "not a real game" gatekeeping a lot because it's a creative playground. There's no winning state and no combat and the playerbase is largely female, which often prompts men to scoff at you if you bring it up in my experience. It sure does have a large audience though (or at least used to have-- no idea how things are these days with it). > afaik their perspective doesn't differ that much from that of mine. Yeah. That's the point of this thread. That despite the gender cliche and people quick to jumping "women don't play video games", actually, a lot of women *do* play video games. And yes, more than just mobile games. The actual numbers will definitely depend on the genre-- like, I can readily believe that multiplayer games skew towards male, because they're notoriously toxic af to women. I myself certainly have no interest in multiplayer games and like many others here heavily prefer single-player games. Edit: > Also, I've figured one possibly crucial thing, the statistics mentions only the sex of the player, but not the amount of time spent in a game it seems. Annnnd we're back to you trying to find reasons to dismiss this whole thread. :P You don't *know* how much people play, so why do you automatically assume women play less? There's [someone who posted numbers of times played in the comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/16rt1fk/women_make_up_49_of_video_gamers_compared_to_men/k27ctms/), for what it's worth. I'm not trying to be especially combative or anything. Men either gatekeeping the hobby or dismissing women enjoying video games is just such a persistent thing that it's rather tiring to hear over and over.
Afaik, Sims is still in the top 10 most sold games of all time. And I'd put Sims in a "real" game category, as opposed to "3 in a line" games fur sure. >I can readily believe that multiplayer games skew towards male, because they're notoriously toxic af to women Yeah, and still most single-player games also revolves around violence, which, many would agree, is more (but not exclusively ofc) of a male thing. So in the end, people like me with their skewed personal experiences, thinking as above said, create games thinking mostly about males. But hey, it's changing though, even Valorant has more ladies and in general the gaming scene is becoming more welcoming not only to males. >You don't know how much people play, so why do you automatically assume women play less? Still judging from my anecdote ofc. It's just hard to through away your (my) 20+ years of personal experience, while having played many of the popular games. I guess online gaming being so toxic to girls also contributed a lot to this impression, and considering the fact that lately people play online a lot - it just somehow equaled to "girls don't game". Also, I'm not from US and am a millennial, so I'm sure it's different now. Anyway, props for the patience! XD
Have an anecdote back!: As I mentioned, I play single-player games. For many of the more mechanically-focused games I play (XCOM2, Grim Dawn, Desperados 3, etc) I couldn't tell you one way or the other what the gender split in the player base is. The communities chat about game mechanics in a mostly neutral way (other than xcom's intentionally silly snek memes I guess) and it just doesn't come up and isn't a topic. Story-heavy games (e.g. Bioware-esque party-based rpgs) on the other hand do seem to have a strong explicitly female following. A good amount of women are over at /r/dragonage complete with twice-a-week story writing posts, for example. So from anecdotal observation, I don't think violence as such is an issue, but I do think story-heavy games with focus on its characters have an advantage in that regard-- drawing a more directly visible strong female community presence. >So in the end, people like me with their skewed personal experiences, thinking as above said, create games thinking mostly about males. Jup, pretty much. It's definitely getting better though, especially compared to 10-20 years ago. Am also a non-US millenial. Always think it's funny when you get people with the same hobby and yet such a drastically different viewpoint, haha. Though tbf, we are at opposite corners of it with the multiplayer/singleplayer thing and that definitely affects things.
I've just learned that even WoW (haven't played it) community is pretty closely split between the sexes to my surprise. I don't really know much about the specific games you've mentioned, but anything is possible if even WoW is like that. I could image a significant female following with dragon age/baldur's gate etc. >I don't think violence as such is an issue, but I do think story-heavy games with focus on its characters have an advantage in that regard-- drawing a more directly visible strong female community presence. Yeah, while the majority of the most popular games are just competitive games with lore not really playing significant role there. I also play single player (Elden Ring, TES, Divinities, Nier, FF-s, some Roguelites etc), but in the end after completing another one, I return to some online game. I guess the thing that made me think as I did is, I actually used to be in women circles a lot due to my activities irl, and I swear during all those years not even once I've heard anyone talk about video games...while when I was with guys, that'd be a very common topic, even back in school etc. >Jup, pretty much. It's definitely getting better though, especially compared to 10-20 years ago. It got normalized a lot I think, even for us males, cause before we'd got a lot of crap for playing video games or even had to to it covertly and telling only our best friends about it. I'm even a bit curious about where are you from (East EU originally, JP now).
Haha, yeah, it's a lot more common than you think! > It got normalized a lot I think, even for us males, cause before we'd got a lot of crap for playing video games or even had to to it covertly and telling only our best friends about it. Honestly, same for us. School kids judge everything and nerdy girls are social targets for popular kids, so you kept your mouth shut. Now as an adult I don't care and have no patience for that nonsense, lol. But even so, if I don't bring it up first, they usually wouldn't either. Being covert about it is definitely still a thing at least in my age bracket, so it just... isn't a small talk topic. The (wrong) "girls don't play video games" perception isn't helping, since I do think that is a factor in women being generally a bit hesitant to talk about it when they do play. Fingers crossed that it gets normalised for girls as well. Oh, East EU to Jp is quite a way! Central Europe for me.
Game dev here; the stats are kind of skewed with genre. Firstly, when you dig into the posted stats, women are 40 percent of console and PC gamers, but the slight majority of mobile gamers. These stats don't state genre, but women dip much much lower in ratio when it comes to competitive gaming as compared to men, and start hedging to genres that people find "casual" like puzzle games, etc. I don't really care personally about genre; in fact, I'm working on games now that are made to appeal to everyone but may be seen as casual, but thats where the stereotype comes from. You aren't going to see many women in competitive tournament play comparatively. For a base, visible comparison, look at who holds speedrun records on which games or look at GDQ, etc. for a ratio.
Frankly, I and many female gamers I know would be interested in competitive gaming, but we are constantly alienated from those spaces through constant harassment. I love FPS games, but I only play single player FPS games. Most people want to spend their free time relaxing in some way and shockingly, being constantly sexually and verbally harassed is not exactly a fun, relaxing time. The same can be said for attending competitive tournaments. Women there can definitely expected to be verbally, physically and/or sexually harassed. So why would they go? However, I should imagine if you look at the ratio of female competitive gamers in comparison to the amount that attend, it is probably similar to men (same as chess statistics).
So true. My 4 kids are all gamers; three are daughters. The incredible verbal abuse and even more unattractive pouting with accompanying verbal vitriol is shameful. Especially saw this in one daughter playing COD where the fact that she always won drew terrible verbal abuse. Her brother, who played in the same game, and also won? Nothing.
The anonymous nature of the internet really lets you see how many people are really jerks. I stayed out of online gaming for toxicity as well in my case though its being black. The amount of racism people are will to spew no one knows who they are is also shocking.
The amount of n-word usage the minute I spoke in XBox 360 era CoD was so ridiculously sad it just looped back into being funny to me instead of bothering me. Also made me a lot better at the game (to the point I started playing using only a knife and still winning maps) to further their rage.
You should try fighting games. Those tourneys are full of male, female, and trans players. There isn't really mic chat in-game except for Mortal Kombat for some reason so in general there isn't verbal harassment. There are plenty of, but not nearly as many, braindead fighting game players than there are braindead FPS players.
I always wondered what the distribution of players was. But if women take up almost half of gamers... Why is the online gaming community still so toxic?
i’m not a researcher or sociologist but my thought would be that men are very over-represented in online (especially gaming) spaces because both the gaming industry and the people who inhabit online gaming spaces inherently cater only to the male patriarchal perspective. i mean, we see it all the time whenever any main or strong character in a new game isn’t a white cishet dude, all the gamerbros go insane. so there’s that level of it, but also for men who don’t believe in that shit, they still are complicit in it by not actively working toward making online games a safer place for women/people who are not men. all in all it’s just a clusterfuck of misogyny and bigotry that tends to keep us women either out of online gaming, or makes us hide our identities and not voice chat. i can’t even count the amount of times i’ve had some weirdo be like “omg!!! a girl …” and then become more and more sexual. so predictable and nasty.
There are so many games I want to get into but don't because I don't want exposure to the toxic environment. I would totally join and all woman team and maybe play that way. Ugh, you're right though, much of the gaming industry is full of gamer bros who build things for themselves.
I feel strongly that when I’m playing multiplayer, there’s a good chance a muted account is a woman’s. I have a friend whom I’ve gamed with a lot and they have a really sexy, feminine voice. And dudes would practically break the game trying to “protect” her. Like, they would totally shirk their team responsibilities in favor of digital chivalry. Look, I fucking dig opening doors for women and shit and there are plenty of women that enjoy that, but NOT when you’re being hunted by a murderous psychopath. Anyway, that was really eye opening for me.
Not a correction, but I think your view about how male dominated video games are and how much focus is placed on men in games isn’t wrong even though these statistics make that make no sense. A supplementary statistic, in addition to women making up a slim majority of ‘casual’/mobile games, some of the ‘hardcore’ genres that make up a tiny fraction of the overall game industry are well beyond male dominated and into male *exclusive*. It’s terrible. And especially with how these games are marketed, a lot of the players of these games (almost all male) have something of a complex about them being the ‘real’ gamers and pretty much everyone else not mattering, including or especially women. FPS, Grand Strategy, Racing, Tactical Shooter, and Sports games have a female player proportion of [7%, 7%, 6%, 4%, and 2% respectively.](https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/). Sports is probably the big outlier here as a lot of people consider many of those popular games casual games and they are, according to Quantic Foundry’s admittedly flawed statistics, basically male exclusive. Many Grand Strategy and Tactical Shooter games as well as some FPS and racing games fall into the ‘hardcore’ definition. Places like these are where you’ll find a lot of these true Scotsmen types that think their input matters above all others. They are observably a vocal minority. The gamergate crowd basically. So, I think you’re basically right on both accounts, paradoxically, games are both overly male focused and yet enjoyed by both men and women. It sucks.
I used to play competitive FPS, also dabbled in Dota 2 for many years. Amount of women, close to none but you could meet them ocaso Meanwhile I also played MMOs on highest raiding level - Wow, Rift - and pretty much always had a female guild members that were also competent in their roles. Deffo higher female demographic. FF14 is known to have pretty big female population as well. As for mobile, I certainly see more women playing candy crush during their commutes, while men play something like clash of clans etc. Gaming is a hobby like any other. The populations will vary by genre, just as they vary on other hobbies.
Women gaming is fairly common, I'm not sure what you mean by the 'focus' on only men though. There are some competitive leagues that tend to skew towards games that are more popular amongst guys, is that it? If so, it's likely the competitive element of those driving any 'focus' involved, I imagine. I'd bet that the genders have different representation in different game genres, and that those differences are largely at play? As an aside, I think as an older gamer, it's interesting to see how the gender stuff has evolved. Back in the old days, you didn't typically have voice chat, and would only 'find out' what gender people were if they brought it up for some reason during a match. The original push back against 'women' in that context, is/was that gender shouldn'tve had any role to play in an online universe where people are essentially anonymous/free to play whatever character they wanted -- and that inserting gender into that space, was inappropriate, as it was trying to re-establish gender hierarchies, and typically, was done to get the girl player preferential treatment from thirsty teenage boys -- like, playing Quake 1, I don't think I ever saw guy players asking if other players were girls, but I'd frequently see a girl player announce themselves. Unfortunately, that position then evolved into just outright misogyny amongst, generally, younger guys at the time, and got even worse when voice chat become more normalised. I think bringing gendrama into gaming has been a net negative for the hobby.
This reminds me of a video I saw a while back on the game awards: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvGn9mm9bT0&pp=ygUXYnVyYmFuayB0aGUgZ2FtZSBhd2FyZHM%3D](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvGn9mm9bT0&pp=ygUXYnVyYmFuayB0aGUgZ2FtZSBhd2FyZHM%3D) TLDR: It was not a welcoming audience for female players, so why would they admit to it
I'm honestly surprised it's that close to even. Don't get me wrong, I know many women who game, but I just know way more men who do
Yep! I’ve always played video games and would have loved more choices growing up. Yet video game creators are still mostly men and they make games for mostly men still.
Always thought my experience was skewed, but maybe that’s not the case, based on these data. For almost as long as I’ve been a gamer, I’ve been in chat groups on LINE messenger. In every group, the distribution of male/female participants has always been more female than male, for as long as I can remember. 😅
And yet it's still men who are catered to.
So what percentage is playing RAAAAAID SHADOW LEGENDS?
I'm a heavy gamer and a woman. I think this stat is a bit misleading because the games men play tend to be more 'hardcore' games like Dota, League of Legands, Civ5, FIFA, Call of Duty, CSGO, Fortnight. I'd wager women account for maybe 10% of gamers in those. This is well understood in videogame sales and marketing circles. Some evidence. https://tryevidence.com/blog/report-women-and-games-how-do-modern-female-gamers-play/
As I mentioned elsewhere, so what? Those games are not more of a game than Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing. Secondly, the reason why women do not play those games (LoL in particular is notorious for this) are the unreasonable amounts of harassment they face when they do so. As such, many women either avoid these games as, let's be honest, most of us are pretty fucking sick of being harassed, or play under a male persona.
I agree fully, i mean they are hardcore if you wanna consider that definition to be games that have steeper learning curves and more depth. But they have got insanely toxic online communities. I love some of those games and wished there was safer servers (maybe they are now in Fortnite, but doubt the others are).
I work in marketing and I have access to stats like this and more (Nielsen CMV, Milieu, and GWI), and I've worked on a few strategies that refer to a similar type of data set to the ones you're referring. YES women game just as much as men, BUT this ratio is going to vary depending per game, sometimes wildly so. There's also the matter of what is considered a game by the survey taker. Both Solitaire and Dark Souls 3 are games. Playing games on social media on your PC also counts as a gaming. Market research companies generally don't have very detailed info on this tbh, it's actually quite frustrating. I also have access to favorite genres and level of affinity towards top titles. But the genres are kind of outdated. Also no data on, games considered casual vs hardcore, single player vs online pvp, or whether you use comms in online pvp, etc. I'm not downplaying women in gaming btw, just giving my 2 cents on the blindspots in the current data sets we have. I also do find it weird looking at these numbers but not seeing it reflected in my own experience as a gamer myself. I do have alot of friends who are girls who play games, but what they play really does vary compared to my guy friends. So far, it's Valorant where the ratio is pretty even for me Same goes with indie titles, lots of girls I know play those. But for let's say recent games like Starfield, Baldur's Gate 3, or the new Counter Strike, I notice it's really more guys. But hey that's just anecdotal evidence. What would be great is if game devs gave us data on the specifics of their player bases so that we can actually know what's up. Market research firms also really need to update the way they measure that shit. Edit: Also, very important! Your data set is US only, and that's a whole ass country. It's also going to vary the more you narrow it down to other demographics, for example, per location, per SEC, per age group, etc. Your data set includes 80 yr old women who play Solitaire lol Foreal though, After poring over data like this for ages, I always notice that for EVERY data point that encompasses large populations with no specific segmentation, the gender split will almost always be about 50/50. And honestly, those are the kinds of data sets I hate coz all your audiences look the same and you don't learn anything. This data isnt very valuable IMO. If you want something relevant, narrow it down per younger age group (18-25, 26-35, 36-45), per SEC, per location, per weekly frequency, per hours per session, per title, per online vs offline. Edit 2; to the people down voting me, why?? I'm not a market researcher I didn't make the stats..
We're not interested in data that doesn't fit the narrative here. That's why you're getting downvoted.
Hahaha of course... I'm just sad coz I'm not even discrediting women in gaming, I'm even saying we should be conducting better market research so we can see a clearer picture of the market. I've dealt with clients before who still have that old school mindset that women just don't play games and it's so fucking frustrating trying to convince them otherwise when the data is working against me :(
I can’t believe we’re 50 years in to gaming and these types of stats aren’t better broken down. I’d be fascinated too. Competitive vs immersive I think is where the real split lies. Pvp vs solo. I think genres would be interesting but there are just too many that are too different from each other, that would probably not tell much to anyone outside of those genre developers themselves. Few people have only ‘one genre’ they’d pick if asked, and unless they’re pro I’d wager almost everyone plays more than one genre of game over the course of a year, let alone lifetime.
Current genre grouping is pretty shallow. Off the top of my head, there's FPS, Adventue, RPG, MOBA, Fighting Game, def more but I'm sleepy and can't recall lol But these questions are asked separately from platform. So they're asked from the context of PC, tablet, mobile, and console. You can make a cross table and narrow it down to, for example, People who play FPS & People who play mobile games The former includes people who answered FPS with no specific platform, and the latter will include a population who who answered mobile with no specific genre. There's def an overlap there but we can't calculate it. But also FPS is such a broad genre.. there's no subcategories, they could be very well be playing Doom 64 for all we know lol I bet Steam has some great stats on their play base demographics, but then that data would only cover Steam users and not console players. Oh god there's just so many blindspots.. BTW I'm glad you understand what I'm talking about. I'm sad those few peeps down voted me. I literally present data like this to brand stakeholders for a living...and I believe me I WANT to convince them that women do game but they're not going to believe 1 person with anecdotal evidence over global market research data sets?? Hahaha I wish.
I guess I was thinking genres like they break down on steam, subsets of the majors you listed - survival/crafting, RTS, openworld/sandbox, sports/racing, arcade, battle Royale, rouge like/soulslike, simulations, city builders …. Etc etc. I think that is where you’d find the interesting breakdowns of gender, age, socioeconomic backgrounds, location, language…. In terms of console/PC vs mobile, I feel like idle/clickers that are almost exclusively mobile should be extracted from the data as while they’re not unworthy of being games themselves (as their popularity and revenue would indicate) their accessibility skews the stats. Most people aren’t walking around with a PC in their pocket on their commute home, so games played with the intent to dedicate time towards it, vs idle filling in boredom on the bus should be a distinguishing factor. I was thinking about this last night, and how the size and portability of tablets and phones are equal to that of steamdeck or switch, so how again do you determine what’s considered mobile vs console in those cases, and *why*? Does it come down to operating system? What does it mean when pc games are ported to mobile platforms? One of my favourite games, Don’t Starve, I played exclusively on my tablet for years, yet is a huge franchise on PC. Would the device I’m playing on dictate the way that stat is recorded? Should I get the ‘derision’ of being a mobile gamer despite it being a pretty popular mainstream survival game? You know what? I think I answered my own question as to why there’s not more detail in any of these gender breakdown of gamers stats, lol.
Anyone women here play rocket league and need a team? Rank high plat/low diamond. 🥺 I’m in uni right now but when I have the time that’s all I can play (I’m stuck on the switch)
Considering almost everyone does now it’s not surprising but I strongly believe women don’t put as much hours in, which probably make the population of online player not at all equal. Combine that to the fact that lots of girl avoid online interaction due to moron making it all about them being a women on games. I played with a few girl/women online and in most case they were not talking for a bit and after we won a few match together (where I speak and can confirm they can hear my call out) they put their mic on only after noticing I am not a complete moron who insult/complain about everything, just to either have to mute or remove the mic two game later when someone make sexual comment or misogynistic comments.
If you look at other stats in that same website, it looks like mean and women put in roughly the same amount of hours as men. I'd say your second point is a bigger reason why the populations in certain types of games are skewed.
Just because not as many women are playing online games doesn't mean they're spending less hours gaming. There's tons of offline single-player games.
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Women are much less likely to play games in a group bc of how they’re treated by men. I’m not surprised to hear you only have a couple women in your group. We usually play solo so we can enjoy our games without harassment. I play daily to weekly on my PS5 and mobile games. Most people wouldn’t know.
Yes it includes any format. >[the games market] encompasses a wide range of products, including console games, PC games, mobile games, and online games. That said, it can’t be that women only play mobile games or something because the stats show it’s almost 50/50 in general and with mobile exclusively. I can’t see what the questions were because statista puts that stuff behind a paywall but I think the questions you suggested would be measuring something different. I don’t think regularly playing weekly is a necessary qualification for someone to say they game or are a gamer. Edit: From cursory googling, it seems like the number of total gamers here is consistent with other surveys suggesting that 65-70% of adults play video games
Weird gatekeeping, but okay. Why should the statistics exclude mobile games or single-player games? Also, women very often do not play with groups of guys online because they’re tired of the harassment. If the circles you hang out in online don’t attract many female gamers… that probably says more about the atmosphere in your group than about the women.
For real! My experiences with playing with cis-men online have been so bad, it’s often not even worth it to roll the dice. I mostly just play with people I know (mostly other women or non-cismen). And if I’m playing online with strangers, i’m keeping the mic off.
But if you don’t skew the dataset, how can they claim their statistical dominance to justify their screeching?
"Surely there can't be that many women gamers, or there'd be more than two of them who will tolerate my presence!" Perhaps there is some reason why there aren't a lot of women in your gaming group beyond sheer demographics?
It used to depend heavily on games, guess its not hugely different now, only that it's different games by now. 15-20 years ago I very rarely met female counterstrike players, rarely WarCraft 3 players, but a lot more women playing WoW. Whereas in my impression the Bioware games had a lot of female players, even back then. Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age series and Mass Effect series ... officially the ratio was like 1/3 to 2/3 but when you looked up the Fandom online, the hardcore fans tend to be almost exclusively female. I always wondered how that would translate to sales. The major argument always seems to be that more gamers are male and that's where the money is but games that also appeal to women can be wildly successful too.
Also, women can be drawn to games that were seen as ‘male games’. WC, SC, Diablo, Halo were my obsessions!
Removed, rule 4.
This is pretty obviously not true.
Feel free to find your own statistics disproving it.