Market Trends
Bartle, Gender, and WOW
Last week’s article was such a hit that we decided to take your advice and do it again, with WoW.
Side note: Feel free to send a comment and let us know what other titles you’d like to see. Note that the data for a particular title is more powerful the more DNA profiles we have – so if you want us to cover a game that you play, make sure you’ve got all your friends from that game over here as well. That sounds like dreadfully gratuitous pimping, I know, but the fact is I can’t draw any conclusions from a data pool of forty people, three of them female. So if you play a less than mainstream title, encourage your friends to sign up, and spread the word on fan sites!
Let’s get going. First, the class breakdown overall:
Obviously, this is less meaningful than the WAR chart, as there is no way (from the data we used) to tell how many of the warriors are Horde and how many are Alliance, and so on. Still, the spread is pretty even, ranging from 6% Shaman to 16% Hunter. The latter makes sense given the mechanics of many WoW encounters. In a future column, we’ll try to dig out the breakdown by Alliance/Horde for you. All I can say for certain is that my data shows Alliance outnumbering Horde by a hair under 6%.
Next, let’s look at the gender breakdown (Note: Gender of the actual player, NOT the gender of the in-game character):
Here’s where I really want to see the Alliance/Horde breakdown, because I suspect some of this balance has to do with which races can play which classes, as it did with the WAR classes. These results aren’t quite as insanely skewed as WAR, but we can see that women are drastically more likely to choose a priest – and men are three times more likely to choose the warrior class as women are, according to their proportion of the population.
Until we get that Alliance/Horde breakdown by class, we can get a rough idea by seeing the player gender breakdown by race:
Okay, on some level, you know some poor researcher is googling “race gender issues” for a Serious Project on Important Topics, and he’s going to get here and see “elves” and “undead.” Furthermore, he’s going to discover a segment of society that cares a whole heck of a lot more about Taurens and Orcs than anything he’s researching. And I wish I could see that guy’s face.
But back on topic: I’ve grouped the Alliance races first, followed by Horde. Again we see women going for the sexy and the lovely, while almost totally avoiding the less delicate races. Orcs and dwarves are sadly neglected among women. Men’s preferences are less pronounced with less of a range. I note with amusement that a slightly higher proportion of women than men choose to play… trolls.
By the way, due to the fact that men outnumber women in WoW, the percentage of players who play a human (remember, last week I pointed out that while everyone tries the freak races, they tend to gravitate to human before long) is at 38% of the total playerbase, even as it’s 20% of all men and 19% of all women. This is why you really need to trust the person spouting statistics at you – it’s really easy to slant things.
As a side note related to proportion, there are nearly four and a half times as many men playing WoW as women. WAR’s proportion of women is nowhere near that, which makes sense given the marketing choices of both games. However, to be fair, women are more likely to play an MMO after watching a friend or loved one take up the game. They are also less likely to be early adopters, since they tend to form long term connections and are wary of the cost of forming such bonds in an environment with no proof of longevity. We’ll come back and take another look in a few years to see if the proportion of women climbed at all. I suspect it will.
So, how about Bartle? What is the percentage of users with each predominate “type”?
Well, the proportion of users who primarily identify themselves as killers is lower than in WAR, obviously. I find it fascinating that in WoW, Killers and Achievers are almost exactly even. Explorers have a whopping 39.5% of the pie, leaving 13.4% for Socializers – exactly the same percentage is WAR has.
Now, let’s see which Bartle types prefer what classes:
Wow, nothing like the definite preferences we saw with WAR. Most types have several classes they like, with the exception of the Explorer having a decided liking for the Hunter above the other classes. However, you can see that the Hunter appeals to all of the archetypes quite evenly.
Finally, since we’re waiting for next week to break it down exactly, let’s see how Bartle might predict a player’s choice of Horde or Alliance:
Wow. That tells me… nothing. Well, okay, not NOTHING. I see that killers prefer Horde by 15% over Alliance. The other three types have a slight preference for Alliance. The proportion of each type that enjoys a particular race is remarkably even.
Overall, even if I knew nothing about the game or its history, I would look at these charts and say this is a game that has settled into its groove.
What say you?
Edit 10/20/2008 5:45pm ET
Due to a crash of our chart provider we had to regenerate the charts after a significant number of new tests and it yielded slightly different numbers due to a few thousand more tests because of the WoW insider article. We have adjusted the article to match the new data.
Does Your Bartle Type/Gender Influence Your Class Choice in WAR?
When a new game launches, the early adopters rush to make long-dreamed-of characters, and they choose the classes that sounded awesome on paper or in the demos. After that first mad rush, though, people tend to fall back on the archetype that they’ve always played.
The Ripple Effects of WAR’s Launch
Every time a new MMO launches, it’s an event like, say, a really big meteor creating the Gulf of Mexico. It takes a few weeks for the dust to precipitate from the air before anyone can see what the new landscape looks like. And because no one’s really sat down and compared the numbers (not in public, anyway), it’s hard to predict future performance with any accuracy. We want to change that.
Spore, DRM, and the Reason For the Rage
The answer to last week’s question: I’m crazy.
Okay, I might not be, but the data isn’t going to back me up, here. (Last week, I said “I have a hypothesis that there’s a generation gap here, as well as a number of people unaccustomed to MMOs and DRM in general.”)
DRM and Spore
Even if you’ve been hiding under a rock, you know that despite one of the best-executed marketing juggernauts in history (and a legitimately awesome game), the big story around Spore has been the Digital Rights Management kerfluffle. Sure, every major media outlet has been trying to carry the carefully pre-packaged drama about how Wright wants to make you into an atheist’s Intelligent Designer. Something like that. I dislike wasting my precious time with choreographed controversy, so I’ve barely paid any attention to that meme. You can find that “story” in Time Magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and more.
A more authentic story is that customers are a raging ball of hate for the way EA chose to handle the DRM issues.
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.
Girls In Gaming: Data Edition
Ah, yes, the girls in gaming edition of this feature. There had to be one, what with all the gender stuff in the US news lately.
Speaking of that news stuff, can I just say that some consistency would be nice? Either women are too sensitive about sexism and need to toughen up, or they are fragile flowers who need to be protected, or both, or neither, but whatever of those four positions you choose, you should really pick ONE and not change your mind when your side is the one taking lumps. Trust me, this ancient debate has long since been happening in the gaming industry, the military, in scientific laboratories, at software companies, and anywhere else old dudes are startled to find women performing as well as men. It is a tiresome discussion that I’d rather not ever have again, but oh, look, it’s all over the place and I can’t avoid it. The country isn’t red and blue, it’s pink and blue. I may vomit.
Fine. I’ll make it my column this week. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
Braid: The Tip of the Indie Trend?
Warning: This column contains the kind of linkbait that can waste entire days. While all links are technically safe for work, they are not safe for productivity.
Xbox Live declared this the Summer of Arcade, and we here at GamerDNA have been watching and thoroughly enjoying the action. And by "we" I mean "the other guys on the team" because frankly, I sucked at arcade games when they required me to pour in quarters, and I still suck at them. I have the reflexes of an elderly tree sloth, and the nervous system of a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. The combination means that eight year old girls peer up at me in pity, and say, "Boy, you’re terrible," in tones that sound like "Boy, is that skin condition catching?"
