> Despite the fact that there has been a huge industry push in the last 10-15 years to make a game that draws in tons of female players
Ultimately its poor marketing. They want to make Call of Duty and get that audience, but also get girls to play Call of Duty. Instead of making a game with mass appear to both boys and girls.
Or admitting that there's just no such thing as universal mass appeal
Universal implies more than just 50-50 split between sexes, imo. It's an impossible standard to reach for any consumer product
I.e. the FPS players could embody the military forces in a complex society where more RPG players are doing the diplomacy and strategy, others are playing in engaging "home front" social environments, someone is off doing city-planner/factory logistics stuff, etc. There could be some deep-diving, dungeon-crawling sub-games within all these realms, but also more casual modes too.
But, crucially, it is all tied together in a unified simulation so that these different player groups are actually steering a coherent story and state space for the shared world. The outcomes of diplomacy, warfare, industry, trade, local social groups, etc. should all have impact on each other.
A good strategist makes the outcomes of individual battles predictable. That makes it terrible for unit players.
I used to play Planetside 2 with a very organized group. Winning was fun at first but you were ultimately a cog in a well oiled machine so it got old fast. It probably got old even faster for the other players who were just trying to play a regular fps.
At the same time, it's not realistic to aim for that level of appeal with every game. Most games are going to aim for some sort of niche, just like any other media.
But there is probably no way to release an Assassin's Creed or Call Of Duty that is going to appeal to women as much as men. That's just not a realistic product goal imo.
Games need to know their audience, and franky they have been very successful targeting young men for decades. My take is that most times they try to target "both men and women" they flop. There are rare exceptions like Baldur's Gate 3 that seem to reach everyone. But it's rare
I agree that it is weird that there hasn't been a AAA attempt to unseat it. You'd think that it'd be a safer bet than yet another hero shooter.
Asking for AAA game studios to make something else is like asking a pizza shop to start making burritos. Sure, you can ask. But really, you should just make your own rather than trying to convince someone else to do it for you.
Corporate interest is primarily financial, anything beyond that is unfortunately all too often only (financially motivated) virtue signalling.
Basically the same reason many other genres (e.g. roguelites) are dominated by little indie studios.
The real successor to an old AAA series is the new series made by people who played it as kids.
So by greedy capitalist standards, these companies are falling short of what they want to do.
My GF, daughter and me all play Stardew Valley but we play it wildly differently. It is a farming/relationship simulator for them and some kind of capitalist min/max farming and mining simulation for me.
But yes, the Sims 3 and the 700 add ons are all heavily in their rotation, they make me look like a gaming amateur if you go by hours logged.
I really like certain directors, but not everything they make.
I know there are some that can enjoy something based on a single aspect alone, but I imagine most are like me. Then again, it's possible I'm the weird one.
Me on the other hand 'yeah I forgot about those two and need to check them out'. My back catalog is quite deep at the moment so I am trying not to buy anything until I play what I got.
That is the thing about suggesting games to someone. It is tough to do. Even though you wildly like the game others do not.
> Another example would be Stardew Valley, or Undertale, which had a huge female following (and sales to match) but had to come out of the indie scene, because all these super politically progressive AAA gaming companies somehow are worse at making things that appeal to women than either companies that existed before, or random indies coming from outside the professional world.
Boomer shooters also came out of the indie space. Survival craft hits? Generally indies. There's plenty of genres that, for whatever reason, have been largely ignored by the biggies.
It’s crazy to me that WoW exists but I think there won’t be a WoW 2. But who knows i was wrong about this with StarCraft as well and StarCraft 2 has turned out OK
Anything they would add in a sequel is just added to the existing game.
Face it, AAA studios just can't do open world and can't do decades-long development cycles, they always immediately lose the plot beneath super-irrelevant graphics, platform deals/restrictions and other crap that's mostly openly detrimental to gameplay and ease of access.
That they insist on treating game development as movie production is my running hypothesis.
Rimworld also has non-inconsiderable female following, but only because it's a) very mod-friendly and b) in continued development for more than 10 years already. Its attention to relationships and interpersonal stuff also helps.
As a "serious" gamer, dismissing (and other dismissable games like smartphone Monopoly) makes sense, but if the topic is "girl games", dismissing them is a mistake. I don't have official stats, but based on women around me, they're very popular, with several saying they're addicted to it/them. So what if they're not Baldurs Gate 3 or Stardew Valley. While we want a depth of discourse deeper than "make GTA6 but in pink" in order to actually appeal to women, leaving out a popular genre with women as Ann address of study because they're insufficient complex while trying to study that area seems shortsighted.
You have a particular experience.
I am not a girl, I do not play games.
The women I know who play games, none play games like that.