New Markets Targeting Women: Turn Based Strategy, and GTA Clones

I’m told that last week’s feature was something you guys enjoyed. More importantly, it was something you guys forwarded to everyone and their dog, which meant ZOMG TRAFFIC for this blog. My conclusion last week, underneath the torrents of verbosity, was essentially “boys and girls are different but not as much as you might have thought.” Here at GamerDNA, we like to go a little deeper than that into topics that our players find interesting. This week, Data Man Steve decided to go looking for games that the same proportion of men and women find appealing. He pulled (from our Xbox data) a list of games played by the same percentage of men and women. And boy, did we identify some awesome opportunities for the gaming industry.

For this column, I chose to only look at games that appealed to 10% or more of the populations of each gender. Since there are fewer females than males swimming in the Xbox pool, the conclusions drawn from the games with a player population under 10% of the female group are less reliable than I’m comfortable with. For further information, go take a stats class. If you are a wussy little liberal arts major like I am, it will be painful, but it will make you a much better citizen, because you will no longer be able to hear reporters citing surveys and polls without screaming SELF SELECTING SAMPLE and INTERVIEWER BIAS and STATISTICALLY INSIGNIFICANT at the television.

Here is the list:

Hexic HD  – 64% of male Xbox players, and 63% of female Xbox players have played this title. (Please note – this title comes with the Xbox hard drive that many people buy as an accessory part. The fact that the game shows up in high, even proportions is, as our Steve says, proof of nothing besides that both men and women like free stuff.)
Guitar Hero III  – 41% both
Guitar Hero II  – 38% males, 37% females
Boom Boom Rocket  – 29% males, 28% females
Carcassone – 29% males, 28% females
Tomb Raider: Legend  – 17% both
MS PAC MAN  -  16% males, 15% females
Crystal Quest – 15% males, 14% females
Spyglass Board Games – 14% males, 13% females
Bully Scholarship Ed. – 11% males, 10% females

The first thing that jumps out is that of these ten titles, six of them are found on the Xbox Arcade. If I were looking to make a game that transcends gender, the arcade would be a great place to start. And it makes sense – by going with a Live Arcade title, I’d miss all the minefields of marketing. I wouldn’t accidently skew my audience by where I chose to spend my advertising dollars. I’d let Microsoft do my advertising for me.

The next thing we’ve got to examine is that while these games have appealed equally to men and women in terms of purchasing and downloading, actual investment varies.  I’m excluding Hexic, since it’s a bundled freebie. Let’s look at the other nine.

When men get into a title, they get into it far more heavily than their equally motivated (to purchase/own) female counterparts. The Guitar Hero titles are both apparently big time suckers for the ones with the dangly bits.

Carcassonne, though. That one’s different. Women play Boom Boom Rocket, Crystal Quest, Spyglass (chess, checkers, that African pebble game) slightly more than the men do, but the one title that tilts heavily towards women is… a turn based strategy game. Wow. I totally didn’t see that one coming. These games are usually not pitched at women, and certainly everyone’s mental image of a Command and Conquer fan (or a Risk player) doesn’t involve femininity. But the stats are plain. It makes me wonder… what would happen if the marketing for turn based strategy was aimed at women?

Let’s take a look at achievement.

I’m not sure the term “achievement” is really fair – the ways by which one gains points in the Xbox gamer score metric vary by game to game. But it’s the best word we have, and it does speak to a certain level of anal retentive goal pursuit mentality. I also suspect that with some of these games, time played is a larger factor than in others.

Those caveats aside, we see that despite having spent a lot more time playing Guitar Hero, the gender gap in scoring is narrower than might have been expected. The gender gap is also narrower than the time played might have indicated for Carcassone. It’s apparently stupid easy to get lots of gamer points in Tomb Raider just by having a pulse. In general, though, females don’t pursue the glory of gamer score at all. This would seem to be a non-factor in targeting women in gaming.

However, that conclusion goes against, oh, pretty much everything I know about women and gaming. Women in general are avid collectors of badges, completion awards, little widgets for their profiles and signatures, and more. Any kind of “scavenger hunt” mechanism where things are checked off a list normally attracts women like yellow jackets to an open can of soda. So there’s my second big surprise. Is the problem with Xbox’s point system, my data, or both?

But the final surprise in this data pile has been staring you in the face the whole time, and you’ve probably been waiting for me to comment. Here is that comment:

WHAT THE HELL.

Bully? BULLY is equally appealing to men and women, scoring ten percent of the population of both genders? 10.5% for women, 10.1 for men.

If you’re not familiar with this title, think Grand Theft Auto set in a high school. It’s a typically well done Rockstar sandbox game, where you can either do the story line or just run around creating mayhem (or doing good deeds, whatever you prefer). You make choices – will you be friends with the nerds or the greasers? – and your choices shape your future experiences.

Nifty, gender-free concept, sure. But it’s absolutely not aimed at women. You play as a maladjusted adolescent male, and one of the things you get points for is kissing girls.

And yet in terms of time played… women are edging out the men, just as they slightly edge out men in actual booting up the title. And both men and women score rather well (312 points on average for women, 339 for men).

Man. Imagine if Rockstar made one of these with a female protagonist and decided to knock off the whole “cap a hooker” score system. It could be the title that cracks the gender barrier into a million pieces.