IndustryGamers - Informing the Games Industry

Activision Doesn't Like Women

Posted August 4, 2010 by Ben Strauss

It has been a long-standing industry “standard” for games to feature male leads. Long have gamers, developers and reviewers joked at the cut-and-paste main characters from many games, featuring the chiseled, scruffy male lead with darker hair rampage against countless hordes of bad guys as they save the day and get the girl.

Games such as Uncharted, Modern Warfare, Halo, Gears of War and just about any other shooter game out there has the player controlling the likes of a male lead, and there is a reason for that, particularly within Activision, states former employees.

According to a report from Gamasutra, female leads in video games have been absent from the mainstream and core audience since 2005, aside from girl focused games such as Barbie.

The reasoning is that Activision does not believe that female lead characters will sell games, and this is thanks to focus testing that has gone on within the company. Activision decided that gamers do not want to see women at the helm of a game. A former Activision employee claims that Activision “said they don’t do female characters because they don’t sell.” Another employee was told more bluntly on one project to “lose the chick.”

The culture of Activision, indicated by former employees, is that too much dependence is put into focus testing. The publisher has been known to take feedback to the extreme, stifling innovation outright, or even sacrificing quality to change products quickly.

"Activision has no room for 'we are making an open-world game with a Hong Kong action movie feel with a female lead,' because that game doesn't exist right now," said one source. "What they do have room for is, 'we are making an open-world game with a gangster main character who can steal cars and shoot people, but it will be in Hong Kong instead of Liberty City.'" As a result, sales dictate development. "If Activision does not see a female lead in the top five games that year, they will not have a female lead," says another source. The publisher will use games like Wet and Bayonetta to prove its point. The report even includes accusations from sources of skewed focus testing to achieve a desired result.

Activision, in response to the article, denied the claims. "Activision respects the creative vision of its development teams," said a company statement. "The company does not have a policy of telling its studios what game content they can develop, nor has the company told any of its studios that they cannot develop games with female lead characters. ... With respect to True Crime: Hong Kong, Activision did not mandate the gender of the lead character. Like all other game and media companies, Activision uses market research in order to better understand [what] gamers are looking for."

Ben is a recent graduate of Xavier University.  You can see him ramble on about gaming, gamification, military-related gaming and manly things on his Twitter @Sinner101GR.