Millions of Women Will Make Fortnite a Billion-Dollar Game
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The game isn't as much aimed as females as gender neutral. Without spending money there is a random chance that you play each match as a boy or girl, and the idea that "when you play as a girl character, guys will help you” is complete bs.
More important to the games success (and it's higher percentage of women playing) is a lower barrier to entry than other more hardcore games such as PUBG or Battlefield. The game was designed to be easy to get in to, and is available on almost all platforms. This more than anything has led to it's smashing success, not "women characters"
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people who weren't really into gaming in the past are all up in fortnite now, male or female.
I have a feeling the bigger motivation is that its f2p.
Normally in shooters the best players dominate the game session you're in. Unless you're one of them, your experience is frustrating because mostly they're either killing you, if they're an opponent, or killing the people you were trying to kill, if the dominating player is your ally.
But in Battle Royale modes every game you're in will involve you dying only at most once.
For the dominant player they often don't die at all, a game lasts say 20 minutes and they might kill a dozen or more other players out of a hundred, then they're victorious. Hooray - they might do that two or even three times in a row. Amazing way to spend an hour.
But somebody like me - who isn't very good - doesn't last twenty minutes. They might win one or two fights, hide, get some cool stuff, but soon they're outmatched and... they die and can immediately start a different game. So for them an hour is maybe 15-20 games, each of them exciting and different, maybe they killed a few people, and the deaths, whilst not _fun_ per se, are over very quickly and you're straight into a different game.
In terms of why it would attract women. Everybody else being an anonymous enemy plus the "one death and you're gone" dissolves a lot of nasty abusive social stuff. Global chat would be pointless, you can't spawn camp people, you can't even tell if you see the same person twice usually because players don't have name tags.
This seems like educated guessing, anyone have better insight?
Compared to Sims/Minecraft/Stardew Valley, where your creation lives on for the entirety of the time you spend with the game.
My guess is that, Mobile has a much lower barrier of entry, no more "computers" installing and set up, spec to play, complex keyboard input etc.
It is simple to understand, point and shoot.
It takes little time, 15 to 30 min a game. No grinding like WoW. As a matter of fact there are also lots of female playing LoL as well. But I think PUBG Mobile and Fortnite is on another level. And these female players, are a lot more willing to spend on in game clothings!
I have a few female friends who never play much mobile games, and couldn't understand why man spend a fortune in a game loot. But the first time they pay PUBG Mobile they decide to buy a nice hat and skirt...... And they asked did we spend all our money on clothing in games... ( Um.. no )
Another point worth pointing out is E-Sport / Gaming has level the playing field of male and female. No longer do genetics and muscle define what can or could not be done. ( Actually they properly still do but much less so then in real world ) And they are actually quite good at aiming and Snipers.
If you are know you liked games like that in the past (because they were gifted to you or because you tried them with friends), you are more willing to pay up front. If you have no idea about whether you will like it, then you have only curiosity to attract you, which is rarely something that makes people pay dozens of dollars.
Also, if the game is marketed "for guy" many girls will not try for the same reason why men avoid pink or cute games no matter what mechanics - it feels like there is something odd or weird about you when you do that.
True, they properly are never going to spend money buying a game.
>Also, if the game is marketed "for guy" many girls will not try for the same reason why men avoid pink or cute games no matter what mechanics - it feels like there is something odd or weird about you when you do that.
I think part of that as well. There are now many Girls playing "Chicken Dinner" in Asia and live-streaming, it seems their circle has also caught on to this, as everyone in their circle are talking about it.
When you have a family, particularly a young one, you have time but not contiguous time. Meaning a 15-30 minute game is possible, a 1-2 hour game is simply not (except perhaps on weekends).
Fortnite, Overwatch, and many mobile games do very well at this. AAA games often fail due to the level of grinding just to be on par (e.g. Battlefield, COD) and for single player games it is a mixed bag, some like Far Cry and Breath of the Wild have gameplay elements (like freeing outposts) that lend themselves to short burst of gameplay with a small reward.
Millennials are now in our thirties. We have families and kids, we game. There's a market for this.
Oh, and another thing that was lost in the 20 years we grown up as millennials. Games are suppose to be FUN. Fun Fun, something we enjoy, not for wasting our time. Nowadays most games are graphics showcase, poor game play, little story line, and mostly for hardcore gamers. Zelda is fun, may be more so then before, but it is now an even rarer breed.
But I also wonder: isn't it just age as well? I feel younger people (e.g. 15 to 20) nowadays are more into gaming in general compared to 30 year olds. The world is getting more digital and people are introduced to it in a much more rapid fashion (e.g. seeing an iPhone or iPad at the age of 4).
Is it celebrities that play? character skins? social elements like emotes?
The casual-ness of the game I think pulls in a wider spectrum of people. Casual meaning you don't need to understand RPG elements, deep story or history, achievements to move ahead, etc. You just download and play and everyone is on a level playing field.
Ok, they say that the proportion of women playing Fortnite is higher that usual for the genre, which is nice.
However, the rest of the article talks about player avatars. If it matched the player base, then Dead or Alive would be played almost exclusively by women... Also look at Overwatch, the most iconic characters like Tracer, Widowmaker and D.Va are female, Tracer is even a lesbian. But still, it doesn't seem to have a lot of influence on the player base.
It's worth noting that women have always enjoyed video games, that the hyper-testosterone driven marketing was an invention to get young boys interested in games after the huge video game crash.
Ever since then appealing to young males has been the default because no big players wanted to rock the boat and mess with a good thing, and as a formerly young male, I was catered to hard and frankly it's gotten old. I'd love to see some new blood in the industry, and especially to stop feeling cringey when I watch game reveal shows featuring faux-masculinity, booth babes, and the rest of the pandering nonsense.
Fortnite is obviously a very casual game. Not saying that's good or bad, that's up to your taste, but it having mass market appeal is not an accident, that's what it was designed for. The fact that people find it so shocking how wide it's appeal is when it was basically designed to be widely appealing is somewhat disconcerting.
Doesn't help that historically games aimed at girls are just... atrocious. Not even talking about the themes or whatever, I mean simply from a software and interactive standpoint, they're just godawful point and clicks.
Edit: Let me be VERY clear here, I'm not blaming girls or women for this AT ALL. Just saying that the shovelware-to-quality ratio is a LOT worse on the more girly end of things, stuff like the Barbie games, animal-centered games, etc. There is nothing wrong with making a game centered around being a model or whatever the hell, and you could probably make some pretty interesting ones with what are traditionally strong female interests. Just saying that a lot of what has been made is pure and utter dreck.
Dresses: Because women traditionally wear dresses, however, you do find Kilts on the man-centered end of the spectrum.
Floral scents: I love floral scents and find most scented products intended for male consumption to be ludicrous, insulting to my intelligence, and obvious marketing pandering put up around the same Axe-scented products. Also if you buy tactical bath wipes, you're pathetic until the end of time. There's nothing un-manly about wanting to be freaking CLEAN and smell nice.
Yes, there are kilts, but the vast, vast majority of men would never wear kilts casually.
I should rephrase that by "without exception", I mean the "vast majority of the time". There's a reason that products marketed specifically towards men feature dull/drab colors and tend not to have floral scents. I don't blame you for how you feel about the products you prefer to use; I happen to buy products from Lush, which have flowery scents that are nose-numbing. Still, I don't think that the vast majority of men would use such products. Then again, if the color of the product was army green and came in bullet casings... maybe.
Most of these links are targeted towards men (Nordstrom's site even explicitly mentions they are men's). Aside from pattern, how are these not purses marketed to men? And not all floral scents are marketed to women, any auto parts store that stocks air fresheners will have floral scents that I've always considered gender neutral.
Yes, air fresheners for cars are flowery and men buy them. LOL That doesn't mean mean that most men are going to choose to wear perfume instead of cologne, buy Herbal Essences shampoo, etc. You can come up with exceptions to any argument, but that wouldn't be a challenge to the general rule.
My recommendation is to disconnect from the AAA games industry entirely then, whereupon you'll likely find that there is plenty of new blood in the industry. In fact, the games industry right now is something where it's almost impossible to stand out anymore, because there's so much new blood. Unless you need to play the top shooters, you can leave AAA pretty easily. Maybe at best you dip your toes back in to the Ubisoft Open World Du Jour once it drops to $5 or something.
When people talk about "Fortnite," they almost always mean the latter. I'd be curious to see how the battle arena demographics compare to the co-op demographics.
It's true that they aren't the AAA games, but... I think the AAA marketplace is substantially skewed by a vicious cycle in which AAA games are expensive to make, because AAA have to be expensive to make, or big companies that make AAA games wouldn't be able to defend their turf against the indies, so AAA games are expensive to make. I wouldn't use the over-used term "bubble" per se, but I think AAA games is a very distorted market right now and I'm not sure said distortion can support too much broad sociological analysis.
An example would be something like Rocket League - there’s only 1 pro that’s a woman, but there’s no reason the game couldn’t appeal. The core gaming segment is ever so slowly getting dragged to not being a boys only zone.
It'll probably last a long time yet. Though anything could happen - a number of Battle Royale games have come and gone. But they've tended to live on shaky ground and make player hostile decisions, whereas Epic has a very solid engine/platform and they make better decisions.