LogFAQs > #974152964

Doe posted...

Are we really back to like 2013 gamergate and pretending that men and women have equal protagonist representation in aaa gaming?

Given that I'm willing to bet 99% of the people in this topic have no idea what the actual representation is, why don't we look at the actual data?

https://diamondlobby.com/geeky-stuff/female-representation-in-games/
Summary:

• In 2022, games where the only option was female made up 45% of games without player choice.
• In terms of all playable characters, 39% were female for multi-choice games
• In terms of "more or less", only 28% of multi-choice games had more female choices than male, with an additional 26% having an equal amount

Here is their methodology:

We studied every game released in 2022, according to Game Informers game release schedule, between January 1st and May 18th (the date we published our research). This does not include every tiny indie game released into the world, but includes the vast majority of major titles and a large number of indie games too, across PC and consoles, and includes games developed all over the world.
There were 152 games released within the timeframe of our study.
We started by eliminating every game that was a re-release, remaster, or had previously been released on a different console. We didnt think it was fair to include these as examples of a 2022 release if they actually werent first released in 2022 at all. Sound good? We think so. 83 of the games were defined as re-releases, leaving us with 68 games to analyze.
We then determined which games had only preset playable characters, which games allowed users to customize their playable character (e.g. they had character creation functionality that allows players to change their gender, appearance and more), and which games had no known playable character (e.g. theyre never mentioned, or youre an inanimate object such as a car). 46 games had only preset playable characters, 12 games had fully customizable characters, 7 had no known character, and we eliminated 3 games due to being based on non-fictional sporting rosters (Rugby 22, MLB The Show 22 and WWE 2K22).*
Our study focused on the 46 games that only allow you to play with preset characters, meaning their gender and appearance were predefined by game developers, rather than chosen by individual gamers via freewill.
*Both Rugby 22 and MLB The Show 22 include no female teams or players, though these games were excluded from our findings.

Now, I guess you can argue that 45% of major games released in 2022 isn't parity, but given that estimates put women at 48% of gamers, that seems pretty damn close. Some will note that they did a different study last year only looking at "main character" breakdown in the 10 highest selling games from each year, but they removed any games that let you customize a character. That study put the number at 27.7% female representation among main characters.