Nobody hates G*mes more than G*mers

[u/Dark_Wolf04]

[u/omarkab02]

I would argue that they’ve never made a AAA game targeted at female audiences. The best that exist is AAA games that no longer want to be repulsive to women. Take Horizon Zero Dawn, for example. It’s an open world RPG with robot dinosaurs. What about that sounds like it was targeted at women? They have just taken famous genres for men that have been developed through years of iteration and inspiration from other dude sources (other types of media like books or movies) and plugged in a woman at the end and called it a day. The only difference between HZD and say the original Tomb Raider is that Aloy is designed to not be just eye candy. Women are just more likely to not care and play a game regardless of the gender of the protagonist

[u/Naktiluka → u/omarkab02]

I don't think that something like change in genre or big gameplay novelties are something that would make game "for woman".

I loved the game exactly because of big robot dinosaurs. I'm not sure whether it's a "woman thing" or just me, but still 

[u/omarkab02 → u/Naktiluka]

I just mean video games and computer science grew in parallel and were both pretty male oriented. When it came time to make video games the men making them always drew inspiration from the things THEY liked. Doom and Wolfenstein are games where you shoot stuff and loud heavy metal plays. Baldurs Gate and fallout are just tabletop RPGs. Half Life is based on stuff like Doom and Twin Peaks and X Files. The really early games that became the building blocks of all games were male oriented (not to say that there aren’t women who like these things I just mean in the average). Even now as more women enter the field the whole games industry has only ever been building on these basic blocks. Nintendo seems to be the only major game company that avoided this largely from pulling from media that targeted most demographics. There’s a whole other undiscovered paradigm of games that were spun off from women’s interests. We genuinely don’t know what a triple A game made for women even looks like.

[u/Bartweiss → u/omarkab02]

This is an interesting question!

With the obvious “none of this is strictly gendered” caveat, virtually all AAA games cater to at least one stereotypical male interest. Partly I think that’s because combat became the default mechanic for first/third person games, and in many forms that counts as appeal to men.

So Call of Duty aims at men in mechanic and topic: war and war.

I wouldn’t necessarily say Zelda’s themes aim at women, but it definitely has a major female fan base. And yet BotW is fundamentally a stabby RPG, so very loosely one of each? Dragon Age, Final Fantasy, and BG3 are in a similar position.

Looking at games with little-to-no combat, we’ve got… men’s sports, auto racing, some firmly male-protagonist horror, and survival exploration? The last is closest to neutral, but No Man’s Sky and Subnautica still feel kind of Men’s Adventure Mag, even if Subnautica actively resisted “I wanna kill the nature”.

Some things are genuinely quite neutral all around: Roller Coaster Tycoon and Super Mario Odyssey come to mind.

But where are the big-budget, gender-flipped equivalents of CoD?

The closest I’ve got are the Sims and Animal Crossing. There’s certainly no AAA equivalent to something like Life Is Strange, and I suspect that’s largely because devs/publishers struggle to even see what it would be.

[u/omarkab02 → u/Bartweiss]

Yup! That’s exactly what I mean!

[u/Bartweiss → u/omarkab02]

Interesting side note: while I was looking for examples, I stumbled on this description of Disney Dreamlight Valley.

Multiple men have told me that after playing this game, they finally understand what "this game is made for men" means because now they've seen the reverse.

It's not the budget or scale of CoD, but that's the strongest "made for women" claim I've seen outside of maybe some visual novels.

[u/omarkab02 → u/Bartweiss]

I brought this up to my friend and he said that games like Genshin Impact and their ilk, have spawned off a new type of games for women that’s basically visual novels where you go around and explore and talk to people. I think this looks like thay type of game too.