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I would like to read that study in detail, but lets say a large amount of switch are purchased and played by women. Does it really make sense for game company to change strategy for the new release of fps/stategy/rpg game to appease (seemingly large) audience that just bought nintendo switch to play Animal Crossing 24/7?
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MMOs used to and still can have large female audiences. Pre-WoW days it was more common but you still see it in places that are more virtual worlds rather than focused on gear/grind/raids. Raiding especially the WoW flavor of it heavily gamified and tuned for a particular experience was a quirk of development/guild/recruiting interaction. Community content, roleplay, player housing/customization, cosmetics tend to be less of a boys club. FF14 is sometimes called an rpgmmo and seems like it has a much more balanced ratio.
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WoW specifically and post-WoW influenced MMOs I was referring to the deep lore, the legacy of steel.
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Most core WoW players (ie players who subscribe permanently rather than only for expansions, and who play many hours a week) don’t raid. Many levels alts, collect outfits/play Barbie, farm old instances for rare mounts, socialize, play minigames, do PvP or mythic dungeons, participate in the endgame single player treadmill (ie world quests or whatever they’re called now) etc etc.
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Interestingly, I feel like game studios have not been as catastrophically bad about this as hollywood. Generally the "audience shifting" controversies are pretty mild and course corrected quickly compared to Star Wars, Ghostbusters etc. It's funny because it seems like this whole thing got started with GamerGate but overall the big studios never totally lost their head, and I think nothing nearly as devastating as new Star Wars has happened to any IP. EA is the one company that I think has made the most missteps, but they were voted the worst company in the world so what do you expect.
The Last of Us 2 took a very progressive turn (including the replacement of the legacy male main character) that has arguably damaged the series irreparably.
Yes this is a more isolated example than the prevalence of the issue in film/tv.
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Developing video games is low status relative to working in Hollywood. Game dev is, on average, weighted toward hard skills where success in Hollywood is weighted toward soft social skills.
Game development on aggregate isn't any more technical than making a movie anymore IMO. We aren't in the 90's where making a game started with building an engine. The bulk of videogames released each year are indie games where the workload of programming is probably less than the art required to fill the space (which is also often just bought from the unity asset store).
If anything you are correct just because it takes literally 0 social skills to solo dev a game, while making a movie usually requires actors, whom would likely need some form of interaction to help guide them. Has there ever been a successful "solo dev" movie?
Point being that success in hollywood isn't really based on soft social skills, but movie making has a baseline requirement for social skills that game dev doesn't have. I imagine however that rubbing the right elbows will get you just as far in Rockstar Games as it would in Disney Films, provided you have a reason to be in the room in the first place.
Having spent time in the single A development space as well as contracting for TLAs, I would rate the average skillset of the technical staff making low budget licensed games and mobile skinner boxes above the people who have to leave their cellphones in a cubby before going into the office. Averages in both cases get brought down when you include artists or systems engineers. Meanwhile isn't there a meme in Hollywood about a desperate need for gaffers who know how to actually light sets and audio engineers who can make speech audible?
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No, they are just boiling the frog slowly, which is the smart way to do it. All gamergate did was give them a solid enemy to point to when anyone mouths off, and as a result this has invoked the chilling effect, leaving gamers afraid of speaking out. So nobody complains much* when Viking women get as much respect as men while they conquer a Britain, or make world war 2 games starring black girls, or "play it safe" and give you a white male protagonist in a world where every other hero is a woman or minority and every other white man is at best broken, if not outright evil. Not even call of duty or halo were safe from this.
*When I say nobody complains much I mean to the same extent as when a developer fucks up the ending to a game.
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