GAMER LOUNGE 20XX (NO CASUALS!!)

[Kosheh]

I disagree...

Games definitely should be advertised to a specific gender, if that's their specific audience. There honestly isn't anything wrong with boob-fest games existing. There's an audience for them, so they'll exist, whatever.

Gender and audience preferences are sexist constructs, Kriven. Get with the times, man.

Yeah man, get with the times. You don't market to Dudes - you gotta market to people. Faceless, generic, boring people



The video above has a point, though - the marketing/advertising/community outreach of most projects are still pretty old-fashioned. However the userbase is beyond "boys" and "girls": gamers in the West are starting to prefer "people".

But what I think is partly the issue is that we live in a culture now full of political correctness...like, even harder than ever before, and one particular issue with that is I feel like that's probably going to lead some Japanese developers to pull out of the market because in some cases the ideas in their games may be deemed "too offensive" for American audiences, or they'll end up overlocalizing titles to the point where they're outright dumbed down.

Like, when you think about it - a lot of the criticism you see on the Internet isn't about how VIOLENT games are any more (with probably the exception of games like Hatred, which intentionally pushes the envelope) but it's about content that's relatively nitpicky in the grand scheme of game design ["I don't like this character because this is an highly unrealistic portrayal of a man/woman"]
(Actually - it's important to note that overly sexualized characters like Bayonetta and even like, the cast of Senran Kagura are actually viewed as an empowering character in Japan, whereas our view on those characters are that they're fetishising/objectifying women. It's...weird, and something that could potentially hurt both the Japanese and American gaming markets)

If you think about it, it's kinda like the Starbucks holiday coffee cup controversy. Rather than actually focusing what's inside the coffee cup, people are making too big of a fuss about the cup itself, completely ignoring that the driving force of the company is actually the coffee. Not the cup.