> Fortnite is also subtly different from existing shooter games, in ways that may specifically appeal to women more than other titles do. It’s relatively easy for first-time players, and it looks more cartoonish and less gory than its rivals.
ehhhhhhhhhhh
people who weren't really into gaming in the past are all up in fortnite now, male or female.
The only difference between this and Overwatch going by those criteria is that OW is not as easy for first time players. You've hit it on the head, the key difference is that somehow Fortnite crossed the boundary to mainstream.
I wouldn't even say the game is easy... The aiming system rewards good players heavily and the building system requires a lot more actions for a battle than something like pubg. I personally stay away from it because the instant building aspect is too hard and annoying to be fun.
I have a feeling the bigger motivation is that its f2p.
The Battle Royale format is _fun_ even if you aren't technically very good. I've written about this before but it does seem to escape even some people who play _why_ this is fun.
Normally in shooters the best players dominate the game session you're in. Unless you're one of them, your experience is frustrating because mostly they're either killing you, if they're an opponent, or killing the people you were trying to kill, if the dominating player is your ally.
But in Battle Royale modes every game you're in will involve you dying only at most once.
For the dominant player they often don't die at all, a game lasts say 20 minutes and they might kill a dozen or more other players out of a hundred, then they're victorious. Hooray - they might do that two or even three times in a row. Amazing way to spend an hour.
But somebody like me - who isn't very good - doesn't last twenty minutes. They might win one or two fights, hide, get some cool stuff, but soon they're outmatched and... they die and can immediately start a different game. So for them an hour is maybe 15-20 games, each of them exciting and different, maybe they killed a few people, and the deaths, whilst not _fun_ per se, are over very quickly and you're straight into a different game.
In terms of why it would attract women. Everybody else being an anonymous enemy plus the "one death and you're gone" dissolves a lot of nasty abusive social stuff. Global chat would be pointless, you can't spawn camp people, you can't even tell if you see the same person twice usually because players don't have name tags.
The large map when compared to a CS or OW map provides a large variety of environments in which to battle. How many times can you run Dust_2 before you are bored, battle royale you just land in a different part of the map.
Fortnite is harder than Overwatch, especially when considering characters like Mercy. In Fortnite you must be able to build while playing a hitscan character. It crossed into the mainsteam because of distribution. It's free and available on mobile devices.
But why? From the article it seems the difference was the marketing imagery, inclusion of female avatars, less gore/more cartoon violence, and mobile play.
This seems like educated guessing, anyone have better insight?
Where would someone see this marketing imagery that they mention? I don't think I'm particularly living under a rock, but if I didn't follow Barstool Sports on Twitter, and thus see memes about guys ignoring their girlfriends to play Fortnite, I would have no idea that this game existed.
Pure anecdotal speculation here - Fortnite lets you build stuff and customize appearances. In video games that have strong female followings (The Sims, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, etc.) both of these features are front and center. Couple that with strong social features (multiplayer + mobile phone) and "marketing buzz" and I can see why this is attractive to women.
I agree, it is short lived, but I think it's more about the feedback loop of "collect/earn then build" that is attractive, not the permanence of the creation. Whereas shooters typically were about the adrenaline rush of the fire fight, Fortnite has more variety of gameplay.
I have no idea, PUBG Mobile also had lots more female playing and I asked a few times all they said was "It is very exciting!", the game is basically the same as CS, Battlefield or all other similar shooting game.
My guess is that, Mobile has a much lower barrier of entry, no more "computers" installing and set up, spec to play, complex keyboard input etc.
It is simple to understand, point and shoot.
It takes little time, 15 to 30 min a game. No grinding like WoW. As a matter of fact there are also lots of female playing LoL as well. But I think PUBG Mobile and Fortnite is on another level. And these female players, are a lot more willing to spend on in game clothings!
I have a few female friends who never play much mobile games, and couldn't understand why man spend a fortune in a game loot. But the first time they pay PUBG Mobile they decide to buy a nice hat and skirt...... And they asked did we spend all our money on clothing in games... ( Um.. no )
Another point worth pointing out is E-Sport / Gaming has level the playing field of male and female. No longer do genetics and muscle define what can or could not be done. ( Actually they properly still do but much less so then in real world ) And they are actually quite good at aiming and Snipers.
Imo, money up front is much bigger barrier of entry for new people then instalation ot other things you mentioned.
If you are know you liked games like that in the past (because they were gifted to you or because you tried them with friends), you are more willing to pay up front. If you have no idea about whether you will like it, then you have only curiosity to attract you, which is rarely something that makes people pay dozens of dollars.
Also, if the game is marketed "for guy" many girls will not try for the same reason why men avoid pink or cute games no matter what mechanics - it feels like there is something odd or weird about you when you do that.
>Imo, money up front is much bigger barrier of entry for new people then instalation ot other things you mentioned.
True, they properly are never going to spend money buying a game.
>Also, if the game is marketed "for guy" many girls will not try for the same reason why men avoid pink or cute games no matter what mechanics - it feels like there is something odd or weird about you when you do that.
I think part of that as well. There are now many Girls playing "Chicken Dinner" in Asia and live-streaming, it seems their circle has also caught on to this, as everyone in their circle are talking about it.
I'm male, but as someone with a family game developers really under-estimated how important it is to have a game you can jump into for 30 minutes or less at a time.
When you have a family, particularly a young one, you have time but not contiguous time. Meaning a 15-30 minute game is possible, a 1-2 hour game is simply not (except perhaps on weekends).
Fortnite, Overwatch, and many mobile games do very well at this. AAA games often fail due to the level of grinding just to be on par (e.g. Battlefield, COD) and for single player games it is a mixed bag, some like Far Cry and Breath of the Wild have gameplay elements (like freeing outposts) that lend themselves to short burst of gameplay with a small reward.
Millennials are now in our thirties. We have families and kids, we game. There's a market for this.
This a million times. I asked for this like for nearly a decade. And it seems wired no game studio quite understand this.
Oh, and another thing that was lost in the 20 years we grown up as millennials. Games are suppose to be FUN. Fun
Fun, something we enjoy, not for wasting our time. Nowadays most games are graphics showcase, poor game play, little story line, and mostly for hardcore gamers. Zelda is fun, may be more so then before, but it is now an even rarer breed.
There is quite some academic research on games and gender that, as a group, female gamers are more found on mobile than on console or pc.
But I also wonder: isn't it just age as well? I feel younger people (e.g. 15 to 20) nowadays are more into gaming in general compared to 30 year olds. The world is getting more digital and people are introduced to it in a much more rapid fashion (e.g. seeing an iPhone or iPad at the age of 4).
It's worth noting that this is definitely from Fortnite mobile, which is just a portion of the overall exposure to the game. I'd be willing to bet if you combined PC, Xbox, PS4 and mobile, it would be much heavier weighed towards male.
> In an industry known for high levels of testosterone, Fortnite has become the hottest game going partly because of its appeal to an unlikely cohort: women.
It's worth noting that women have always enjoyed video games, that the hyper-testosterone driven marketing was an invention to get young boys interested in games after the huge video game crash.
Ever since then appealing to young males has been the default because no big players wanted to rock the boat and mess with a good thing, and as a formerly young male, I was catered to hard and frankly it's gotten old. I'd love to see some new blood in the industry, and especially to stop feeling cringey when I watch game reveal shows featuring faux-masculinity, booth babes, and the rest of the pandering nonsense.
Fortnite is obviously a very casual game. Not saying that's good or bad, that's up to your taste, but it having mass market appeal is not an accident, that's what it was designed for. The fact that people find it so shocking how wide it's appeal is when it was basically designed to be widely appealing is somewhat disconcerting.
How is it still possible that so much of game's marketing budgets are still almost exclusively aimed at male players? For example, Fallout 4 has the creative building, storytelling, and (much more so in New Vegas, but even in 4) it is to your advantage to play a female character due to perks. And yet I don't see any marketing stills with a female PC in the first page of Google image search. This is anecdotal, but I have two female friends who both continue to play skyrim, but never tried any of the fallout games. The saddest part is the very vocal outcries any time a studio tries to appeal to women. Sure, pandering is bad, but there's a wide difference between pandering and what epic games is doing. Plus, a bonus is that inclusive marketing also seems to attract more 'non-gamers' in general,leading to their current throne of cash.
Like any other situation where tons of big players with big budgets are doing a thing that seems stupid, it's because it does work, even if stupid, and because none of them want to "risk" being the studio known as the one that makes the "girl games."
Doesn't help that historically games aimed at girls are just... atrocious. Not even talking about the themes or whatever, I mean simply from a software and interactive standpoint, they're just godawful point and clicks.
Edit: Let me be VERY clear here, I'm not blaming girls or women for this AT ALL. Just saying that the shovelware-to-quality ratio is a LOT worse on the more girly end of things, stuff like the Barbie games, animal-centered games, etc. There is nothing wrong with making a game centered around being a model or whatever the hell, and you could probably make some pretty interesting ones with what are traditionally strong female interests. Just saying that a lot of what has been made is pure and utter dreck.
Purses, Hand bags: Because women's clothing is atrocious with regard to pockets of usable size.
Dresses: Because women traditionally wear dresses, however, you do find Kilts on the man-centered end of the spectrum.
Floral scents: I love floral scents and find most scented products intended for male consumption to be ludicrous, insulting to my intelligence, and obvious marketing pandering put up around the same Axe-scented products. Also if you buy tactical bath wipes, you're pathetic until the end of time. There's nothing un-manly about wanting to be freaking CLEAN and smell nice.
No, that's not why men don't wear women's clothing. Those are complains women have about their own clothing(and they're right!). Men don't go walking around with hand bags and purses in general, in fact I'd guess 99% of the time. Messenger bags don't count.
Yes, there are kilts, but the vast, vast majority of men would never wear kilts casually.
I should rephrase that by "without exception", I mean the "vast majority of the time". There's a reason that products marketed specifically towards men feature dull/drab colors and tend not to have floral scents. I don't blame you for how you feel about the products you prefer to use; I happen to buy products from Lush, which have flowery scents that are nose-numbing. Still, I don't think that the vast majority of men would use such products. Then again, if the color of the product was army green and came in bullet casings... maybe.
Most of these links are targeted towards men (Nordstrom's site even explicitly mentions they are men's). Aside from pattern, how are these not purses marketed to men? And not all floral scents are marketed to women, any auto parts store that stocks air fresheners will have floral scents that I've always considered gender neutral.
Be honest here... you typed "messenger bag" instead of "purse" into Duck Duck Go because you knew that the latter would return only bags that most men wouldn't be caught dead carrying.
Yes, air fresheners for cars are flowery and men buy them. LOL That doesn't mean mean that most men are going to choose to wear perfume instead of cologne, buy Herbal Essences shampoo, etc. You can come up with exceptions to any argument, but that wouldn't be a challenge to the general rule.
"I'd love to see some new blood in the industry, and especially to stop feeling cringey when I watch game reveal shows featuring faux-masculinity, booth babes, and the rest of the pandering nonsense."
My recommendation is to disconnect from the AAA games industry entirely then, whereupon you'll likely find that there is plenty of new blood in the industry. In fact, the games industry right now is something where it's almost impossible to stand out anymore, because there's so much new blood. Unless you need to play the top shooters, you can leave AAA pretty easily. Maybe at best you dip your toes back in to the Ubisoft Open World Du Jour once it drops to $5 or something.
I pretty much have, to be honest. I still go back for my Halo and Gears of War fixes but that's mostly a nostalgia thing. I've become the indie-shill of my friend group, much to their benefit/chagrin.
This is a poor article. Props to Fortnite for having a higher percentage of female players, but the article doesn't provide any legit justification for it. An inside source providing vague information doesn't really help the legitimacy of the article.
The game isn't as much aimed as females as gender neutral. Without spending money there is a random chance that you play each match as a boy or girl, and the idea that "when you play as a girl character, guys will help you” is complete bs.
More important to the games success (and it's higher percentage of women playing) is a lower barrier to entry than other more hardcore games such as PUBG or Battlefield. The game was designed to be easy to get in to, and is available on almost all platforms. This more than anything has led to it's smashing success, not "women characters"
The sad truth is that for all that it seems to be popular here, Bloomberg is a rag and it almost always shows. They start with an agenda and work lazily backwards from that. Fortnite is f2p, and massively popular, and a lot of women play games. Therefore, a lot of women play Fortnite, but that doesn’t support their foregone conclusions or let them shit out an article.
They probably could've mentioned exactly that if they took into account South Korea, where gaming is much more engrained in the culture and shows less of a gender divide - but then they would have to do research and gather domain knowledge...
There’s been a good 20+ years of marketing games only to males - if it’s finally turning so that there’s not a huge social pressure for any popular game to be a “guys only” thing, especially in gradeschool then this is a momentous occasion.
There's already substantial markets for games marketed to women, played mostly by women, oftimes made by women. If you are not aware of them... well... perhaps you are simply not in the target market and have never received that marketing.
It's true that they aren't the AAA games, but... I think the AAA marketplace is substantially skewed by a vicious cycle in which AAA games are expensive to make, because AAA have to be expensive to make, or big companies that make AAA games wouldn't be able to defend their turf against the indies, so AAA games are expensive to make. I wouldn't use the over-used term "bubble" per se, but I think AAA games is a very distorted market right now and I'm not sure said distortion can support too much broad sociological analysis.
There are plenty, and I’m very aware of them having worked in the industry - I’m mostly pointing to AAA “Core” gamers (+ esports related gamers) which has been male-dominated for mostly historical reasons at this point.
An example would be something like Rocket League - there’s only 1 pro that’s a woman, but there’s no reason the game couldn’t appeal. The core gaming segment is ever so slowly getting dragged to not being a boys only zone.
What strikes me as weird is that I liked the Fortnite that came before Fortnite - that is, the co-op survival mode, not the battle arena mode.
When people talk about "Fortnite," they almost always mean the latter. I'd be curious to see how the battle arena demographics compare to the co-op demographics.
It would have been great if they took the time to interview a few female players of Fortnite for the article. It would have provided some perspective into what pulls them into the game.
Is it celebrities that play? character skins? social elements like emotes?
The casual-ness of the game I think pulls in a wider spectrum of people. Casual meaning you don't need to understand RPG elements, deep story or history, achievements to move ahead, etc. You just download and play and everyone is on a level playing field.
It won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. They just recently announced $100,000,000 (not a typo) of prizes for the upcoming year. Lots of pros that snubbed their nose at it over the past few months are now doing half Fortnite streams ok top of their core game as they try to see if they can be competitive
Popular multiplayer games like this can have very strong staying power, especially if they become eSports. It's not a minor diversion like Flappy Bird.
It'll probably last a long time yet. Though anything could happen - a number of Battle Royale games have come and gone. But they've tended to live on shaky ground and make player hostile decisions, whereas Epic has a very solid engine/platform and they make better decisions.
What is the problem with making games that appeal to a niche? I'd often find games that try to appeal to everybody end up pissing everyone off in the end.
It there any backing behind the "findings" of that articles.
Ok, they say that the proportion of women playing Fortnite is higher that usual for the genre, which is nice.
However, the rest of the article talks about player avatars. If it matched the player base, then Dead or Alive would be played almost exclusively by women... Also look at Overwatch, the most iconic characters like Tracer, Widowmaker and D.Va are female, Tracer is even a lesbian. But still, it doesn't seem to have a lot of influence on the player base.
Do you play Overwatch? Anecdotes follow from someone that's gamed for 25+ years (I'd love to see data). On PC at least, the amount of female players is astounding. Most (not all) play Mercy, which seems to be a mix of she's easy to play for new gamers, plus she's female. Followed by DVA.
I've noticed the same thing but Overwatch is NOT a good game for casual or novice gamers because a large percentage of games involve someone getting upset in team chat, blaming others, huge amounts of negativity, and the occasional troll spewing racial slurs.
54 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadehhhhhhhhhhh
people who weren't really into gaming in the past are all up in fortnite now, male or female.
I have a feeling the bigger motivation is that its f2p.
Normally in shooters the best players dominate the game session you're in. Unless you're one of them, your experience is frustrating because mostly they're either killing you, if they're an opponent, or killing the people you were trying to kill, if the dominating player is your ally.
But in Battle Royale modes every game you're in will involve you dying only at most once.
For the dominant player they often don't die at all, a game lasts say 20 minutes and they might kill a dozen or more other players out of a hundred, then they're victorious. Hooray - they might do that two or even three times in a row. Amazing way to spend an hour.
But somebody like me - who isn't very good - doesn't last twenty minutes. They might win one or two fights, hide, get some cool stuff, but soon they're outmatched and... they die and can immediately start a different game. So for them an hour is maybe 15-20 games, each of them exciting and different, maybe they killed a few people, and the deaths, whilst not _fun_ per se, are over very quickly and you're straight into a different game.
In terms of why it would attract women. Everybody else being an anonymous enemy plus the "one death and you're gone" dissolves a lot of nasty abusive social stuff. Global chat would be pointless, you can't spawn camp people, you can't even tell if you see the same person twice usually because players don't have name tags.
This seems like educated guessing, anyone have better insight?
Compared to Sims/Minecraft/Stardew Valley, where your creation lives on for the entirety of the time you spend with the game.
My guess is that, Mobile has a much lower barrier of entry, no more "computers" installing and set up, spec to play, complex keyboard input etc.
It is simple to understand, point and shoot.
It takes little time, 15 to 30 min a game. No grinding like WoW. As a matter of fact there are also lots of female playing LoL as well. But I think PUBG Mobile and Fortnite is on another level. And these female players, are a lot more willing to spend on in game clothings!
I have a few female friends who never play much mobile games, and couldn't understand why man spend a fortune in a game loot. But the first time they pay PUBG Mobile they decide to buy a nice hat and skirt...... And they asked did we spend all our money on clothing in games... ( Um.. no )
Another point worth pointing out is E-Sport / Gaming has level the playing field of male and female. No longer do genetics and muscle define what can or could not be done. ( Actually they properly still do but much less so then in real world ) And they are actually quite good at aiming and Snipers.
If you are know you liked games like that in the past (because they were gifted to you or because you tried them with friends), you are more willing to pay up front. If you have no idea about whether you will like it, then you have only curiosity to attract you, which is rarely something that makes people pay dozens of dollars.
Also, if the game is marketed "for guy" many girls will not try for the same reason why men avoid pink or cute games no matter what mechanics - it feels like there is something odd or weird about you when you do that.
True, they properly are never going to spend money buying a game.
>Also, if the game is marketed "for guy" many girls will not try for the same reason why men avoid pink or cute games no matter what mechanics - it feels like there is something odd or weird about you when you do that.
I think part of that as well. There are now many Girls playing "Chicken Dinner" in Asia and live-streaming, it seems their circle has also caught on to this, as everyone in their circle are talking about it.
When you have a family, particularly a young one, you have time but not contiguous time. Meaning a 15-30 minute game is possible, a 1-2 hour game is simply not (except perhaps on weekends).
Fortnite, Overwatch, and many mobile games do very well at this. AAA games often fail due to the level of grinding just to be on par (e.g. Battlefield, COD) and for single player games it is a mixed bag, some like Far Cry and Breath of the Wild have gameplay elements (like freeing outposts) that lend themselves to short burst of gameplay with a small reward.
Millennials are now in our thirties. We have families and kids, we game. There's a market for this.
Oh, and another thing that was lost in the 20 years we grown up as millennials. Games are suppose to be FUN. Fun Fun, something we enjoy, not for wasting our time. Nowadays most games are graphics showcase, poor game play, little story line, and mostly for hardcore gamers. Zelda is fun, may be more so then before, but it is now an even rarer breed.
But I also wonder: isn't it just age as well? I feel younger people (e.g. 15 to 20) nowadays are more into gaming in general compared to 30 year olds. The world is getting more digital and people are introduced to it in a much more rapid fashion (e.g. seeing an iPhone or iPad at the age of 4).
It's worth noting that women have always enjoyed video games, that the hyper-testosterone driven marketing was an invention to get young boys interested in games after the huge video game crash.
Ever since then appealing to young males has been the default because no big players wanted to rock the boat and mess with a good thing, and as a formerly young male, I was catered to hard and frankly it's gotten old. I'd love to see some new blood in the industry, and especially to stop feeling cringey when I watch game reveal shows featuring faux-masculinity, booth babes, and the rest of the pandering nonsense.
Fortnite is obviously a very casual game. Not saying that's good or bad, that's up to your taste, but it having mass market appeal is not an accident, that's what it was designed for. The fact that people find it so shocking how wide it's appeal is when it was basically designed to be widely appealing is somewhat disconcerting.
Doesn't help that historically games aimed at girls are just... atrocious. Not even talking about the themes or whatever, I mean simply from a software and interactive standpoint, they're just godawful point and clicks.
Edit: Let me be VERY clear here, I'm not blaming girls or women for this AT ALL. Just saying that the shovelware-to-quality ratio is a LOT worse on the more girly end of things, stuff like the Barbie games, animal-centered games, etc. There is nothing wrong with making a game centered around being a model or whatever the hell, and you could probably make some pretty interesting ones with what are traditionally strong female interests. Just saying that a lot of what has been made is pure and utter dreck.
Dresses: Because women traditionally wear dresses, however, you do find Kilts on the man-centered end of the spectrum.
Floral scents: I love floral scents and find most scented products intended for male consumption to be ludicrous, insulting to my intelligence, and obvious marketing pandering put up around the same Axe-scented products. Also if you buy tactical bath wipes, you're pathetic until the end of time. There's nothing un-manly about wanting to be freaking CLEAN and smell nice.
Yes, there are kilts, but the vast, vast majority of men would never wear kilts casually.
I should rephrase that by "without exception", I mean the "vast majority of the time". There's a reason that products marketed specifically towards men feature dull/drab colors and tend not to have floral scents. I don't blame you for how you feel about the products you prefer to use; I happen to buy products from Lush, which have flowery scents that are nose-numbing. Still, I don't think that the vast majority of men would use such products. Then again, if the color of the product was army green and came in bullet casings... maybe.
Most of these links are targeted towards men (Nordstrom's site even explicitly mentions they are men's). Aside from pattern, how are these not purses marketed to men? And not all floral scents are marketed to women, any auto parts store that stocks air fresheners will have floral scents that I've always considered gender neutral.
Yes, air fresheners for cars are flowery and men buy them. LOL That doesn't mean mean that most men are going to choose to wear perfume instead of cologne, buy Herbal Essences shampoo, etc. You can come up with exceptions to any argument, but that wouldn't be a challenge to the general rule.
My recommendation is to disconnect from the AAA games industry entirely then, whereupon you'll likely find that there is plenty of new blood in the industry. In fact, the games industry right now is something where it's almost impossible to stand out anymore, because there's so much new blood. Unless you need to play the top shooters, you can leave AAA pretty easily. Maybe at best you dip your toes back in to the Ubisoft Open World Du Jour once it drops to $5 or something.
The game isn't as much aimed as females as gender neutral. Without spending money there is a random chance that you play each match as a boy or girl, and the idea that "when you play as a girl character, guys will help you” is complete bs.
More important to the games success (and it's higher percentage of women playing) is a lower barrier to entry than other more hardcore games such as PUBG or Battlefield. The game was designed to be easy to get in to, and is available on almost all platforms. This more than anything has led to it's smashing success, not "women characters"
Welcome to Bloomberg.
It's true that they aren't the AAA games, but... I think the AAA marketplace is substantially skewed by a vicious cycle in which AAA games are expensive to make, because AAA have to be expensive to make, or big companies that make AAA games wouldn't be able to defend their turf against the indies, so AAA games are expensive to make. I wouldn't use the over-used term "bubble" per se, but I think AAA games is a very distorted market right now and I'm not sure said distortion can support too much broad sociological analysis.
An example would be something like Rocket League - there’s only 1 pro that’s a woman, but there’s no reason the game couldn’t appeal. The core gaming segment is ever so slowly getting dragged to not being a boys only zone.
When people talk about "Fortnite," they almost always mean the latter. I'd be curious to see how the battle arena demographics compare to the co-op demographics.
Is it celebrities that play? character skins? social elements like emotes?
The casual-ness of the game I think pulls in a wider spectrum of people. Casual meaning you don't need to understand RPG elements, deep story or history, achievements to move ahead, etc. You just download and play and everyone is on a level playing field.
It'll probably last a long time yet. Though anything could happen - a number of Battle Royale games have come and gone. But they've tended to live on shaky ground and make player hostile decisions, whereas Epic has a very solid engine/platform and they make better decisions.
Ok, they say that the proportion of women playing Fortnite is higher that usual for the genre, which is nice.
However, the rest of the article talks about player avatars. If it matched the player base, then Dead or Alive would be played almost exclusively by women... Also look at Overwatch, the most iconic characters like Tracer, Widowmaker and D.Va are female, Tracer is even a lesbian. But still, it doesn't seem to have a lot of influence on the player base.