From this article on the Wii and female gamers comes this quote courtesy of Ubisoft.
“What’s driving the Wii sales is the use of Wii by women, girls and families,” Hamilton said. “It’s a really female-driven platform.”
As of May 2008, according to Nintendo 79% of the people who buy the Wii are male which means that 21% of those people who bought the system were female. As a household playing figure, the numbers are a little more charitable for Ubisoft with 45% of players for the Wii’s audience being female.
The point isn’t that the Wii doesn’t have a high number of female gamers compared to other platforms (it does) or that Ubisoft isn’t right to be making games targeted towards females (they are). It’s just a little sad to see the media and everyone else get so excited that we are even approaching a state that semi-resembles gender parity in games for one or two platforms. Females are still highly underrepresented in just about every facet of the industry and the mountains of Imaginez software are not exactly tipping the scales back here. There’s a long way to go before publishers, developers, and gamers can claim with a straight face that the game industry is open equally to both genders.
Before we go, one last gem from the article.
“Girls have a very high impact on how we interact with each other. As a human race, we have men and women — and we all communicate together.”
Yes, Mr. PR man. Girls do have a high impact on how we communicate. This might be because women make up over 50% of the world’s population. Yes, I can see the logic of this statement.
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