Twin sisters worth millions thanks to female gamers
bbc.com
bbc.com
Plus their games serve a well established genre.
So this isn't quite the new idea rags to riches story that it is presented as. Mostly, this says a lot about how Japanese society still has clear gender roles.
Instead, we should be celebrating their ingenuity in seeing a wildly undeserved market and succeeding at building something successful yo cater to it. This is something we can all aspire to instead of making it about gender.
But in reality, they likely went from "millionaires" to "multi-millionaires". At least, it looks like their revenue (and thus estimated company value) grew linearly in recent years:
It could be written far better without mentioning numbers.
As Skeletor once said: WAT?!
If you got millions you are part of the 0.5%.
Only really true in America and well see how that holds up as we progress with America's collapse.
It doesn't. However people do jump to conclusion. I also assumed that it's a rags to riches story, however incorrect it is.
Just about as much as titles like to feed this habit. They're designed to leave the wrong impression in order to trigger a reaction.
"Jeff Bezos becomes a trillionaire thanks to lettuce". It's going to make you wonder, draw conclusions, call it ridiculous, want to tell someone about it. But yeah, I mean lettuce is what's also sold at Whole Foods, and that may be what takes Bezos from $999.99bn to $1tn so it may be technically correct. The least useful kind of correct.
"Millionaire twin sisters greatly increase their wealth after targeting female gamer market" doesn't have the same pull although it's just as accurate. But it gives too much information and you're no longer interested in clicking.
Regardless, props to them for finding a niche to serve and get rich(er) from, especially in a market that doesn't cater very well to that segment.
That's the content of the article, and it's newsworthiness is hard to fault here. Not sure why people need to make loud defences of IDW personalities or invoke statistical differences in competencies across genders.
What are you implying? That that's a bad thing? Otherwise, I apologize for assuming incorrectly.
I don't remember reading much about Julie Wainwright, who did the "The RealReal" IPO at 8x the market cap in the US 2 years ago.
As for gender roles, I believe they can both be harmful (if forced upon you) and very helpful (if voluntarily agreed upon).
As an example, I rarely worry about my bad cooking skills these days, because my wife is exceptionally good at it. So in effect, we have created a traditional role of "the woman in the kitchen", but it's the result of us trying to optimize how things work out for us, not because of some external societal pressure.
Similarly, "guys carrying heavy stuff" is such a cliche because it usually works well, due to differences in biological growth. I'm 15% taller than my wife, and for some tasks that makes all the difference between easy and horrible.
But that's not a gender role, that's one person being a better cook.
Not GP but I'm glad there's some variety in the world.
It is enough of an imbalance to cause fierce competition amongst the men. Assuming a nuclear family and sensible family planning, it is highly likely that a bunch of men will not get to have families.
The men working hard to make money are in a fairly high-stakes game to break into the gene pool, biologically speaking. It isn't surprising to me that the men take working a lot more seriously. Every generation nature is roughly planning to cull ~1 man in 20 before life even starts. Individually it might not get acknowledged but that is a mighty biasing force over even 2 generations of cultural development. Being the lowest status man in the room has an implicit evolutionary threat in the way that being the lowest status woman doesn't.
What perceptible "evolutionary threat" could there possibly be in a 105:100 imbalance, which is so low as to be pretty much unknown to everyone who doesn't follow demographic data?
Rank them by the security of their relationship with their girlfriend or wife. The first few without a partner (the marginal ones) would in all likelihood have partner if they were an equivalent girl. There is a lot of incentive to behave competitively.
[0]: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6412/eaas9899
Why? Why can't there just be innate biological differences in what people are interested in, between the genders, as a lot of data suggests.
Also if that is your hypothesis, how do you explain the data point that shows that the more egalitarian (free and fair) a country is, the higher the differences between the gender interests?
Also JBP is simply quoting the research in the social and psychological and psychometric fields that already exists, and is being done by a lot of other scientists. Isn't that the exact opposite of being "a hack"?
He isn't, that is the main criticism. He usually uses actual research, yes, but then extrapolates widely and without empirical support.
For example he uses observed gender differences in the Big Five traits (which are actually there, though keep in mind the Big Five traits by themselves are already about 50% society, not genes), but then postulates differences in e.g. natural sciences, which cannot reasonably derived from this base.
His postulations often also actually stand in contrast to empirical evidence. For example in eastern Germany, the area of the former GDR, where gender equality was officially mandated and thus stronger than it is even now in Germany, girls had on average better math grades than boys in the 90s and early 2000s (see the national TIMSS data for these periods. This effect only disappeared in generations born after German reunification.
All this isn't surprising as Peterson is a Jungian (which is quack psychology), and to my knowledge has no empirical background.
Also, studies have shown that in more gender role laissez-faire societies there's actually a greater difference between genders, which your GDR study inadvertently corroborates.
How do you build that argument? If it was equality of outcome that was officially mandated, that is exact opposite of true freedom of opportunity.
Also I'm not sure why you are talking about math grades, when the discussion was specifically about interests, - ie, how many of those girls then proceed into careers in mathematical disciplines. Just because someone gets good grades in school in a subject, doesn't mean that the person is going to choose (ie, is intereste in) pursuing that subject as a life career path.
I have said nothing about equality of outcome.
There is no freedom of opportunity without societal context. I am, as a man, legally free to wear a skirt in my country, yet I've never done and I've also met almost none who did - because of the socials costs this would incur. And skirt wearing is obviously 100% culture, 0% genes.
The surrounding society frames what opportunities are actually free to embrace.
Interests, BTW, are by their nature not really empirically measurable (you can give people questionnaires, but that's about it). You can't infer girl's interest in math from their chosen profession, that's why I gave an example of actual ability. This is also why serious psychologists usually research other concepts - and I suspect this is also why Peterson likes to talk about interests: they are essentially an unfalsifiable topic.
I also have never weared skirt, but reasons are entirely personal - have no internal motivation to do so, have opinion that trousers are more practical and have no skirt in wardrobe. But i assume that if i ever wear a skirt, nobody would give a damn.
You can say that lack of my personal interest to wear a skirt is an effect of societal indoctrination and it may be true, but there is a clear difference between accepting/integrating that position and being forced to it by fear of societal costs. The second is oppression, the first is not.
Really? Give it a try for a month.
I would be highly surprised if you don’t get called names, ridiculed, or worse, physically attacked.
And that is if your employer even allows you to wear a dress in the office.
Sounds like an interesting experiment. Perhaps i will try that after covid season.
I see...
You need some serious twisting of the objective reality and ignoring a lot of things to arrive at that "skirt wearing is 100% culture" conclusion. But if you do believe that then of course it's easy to see how the rest follows from it.
I do not see it at all the same way.
Skirt wearing, as well as other clothes, especially "beautiful/sexu" clothes, is very related to the sexuality of people and the differences of how that sexuality plays out different in males/females. It has physiological differences, visual differences, ideological differences, practical differences in sexual selection, etc. To say that all that is just societally constructed is basically the same as saying "gender is purely a social construct", which, IMO, is 100% military-grade bullshit. It is used by ideologs to split the society and promote certain political agendas, it does not come from science.
I can imagine a society where it would not be about skirts per se, but it would be about some other very similar piece of clothing, that would similarly demonstrate female features, and signal things like health, sexual proclivities, sexual availability, age, sexual preferences etc. Those clothing pieces would also talk to the same centres in our brain that understand beauty, symmetry, healthy body shapes, etc. Most of those things are rooted in biology or deeper, even if there is a thick societal layer of covering on top of that.
I don't think that has ever been in question, last I remember the evidence is girls generally perform better in the education system. That is weak evidence in favour of there being innate gender differences.
Pretty much every company I've worked for over 100 people has made it quite clear they'd hire a girl over me if one had applied. As far as I can tell I owe my employment path to the fact that, as a gender, girls appear to be refusing to compete for it. The formal structures I've seen were formally tilted in favour of women in education, hiring and salaries.
But my example showed that this isn't an innate gender difference. The effect disappeared after the kids grew up in another system.
> As far as I can tell I owe my employment path to the fact that, as a gender, girls appear to be refusing to compete for it.
It was the same for actual professions: The female share of engineers was significantly higher in Eastern Germany than in Western Germany, and is no sinking since the reunification: https://www.industrial-production.de/wirtschaft---unternehme... (German source, sorry)
(Edited with a better source)
this by itself is a contradiction. what makes a country egalitarian? how can you say a country is egalitarian and then say that some interests are not equally shared by men and women. in these countries women barely had voting rights 100 years ago but now they are called "egalitarian". maybe let's wait a generation or 2 more before concluding women biologically don't like math.
it's not even worth debating this pseudoscience. jordan is a quack. I imagine only sexists follow him because his idiotic but articulated explanations fit their view.
No it's not.
What makes a country egalitarian is set of laws and practices that give people most possible choice and regulate on a legal level the amount of prejudice the people have to face.
In other words, the amount of freedoms to choose that people get.
In the western developed countries, the more freedoms a country gives to people, the farther apart genders become in their self-expressed (self-chosen) occupations and intersts. Explain that.
> maybe let's wait a generation or 2 more before concluding women biologically don't like math.
Well it's been exactly more than two generations and all the data is moving in the wrong direction from your hypothesis. A lot of people feel like they have waited enough to make these conclusions.
Just calling someone a quack is just not a good argument, you need to show your reasoning instead.
In a free societies with free education like most West-Europeans are, this is indeed the best explanation up to date. At least way more convincing than conspiracy theories in which a sexual minority is purposely oppressing the majority.
It's hard to get that kind of variety into a single society. So it's nice that societies differ.
Is having a college degree female? Owning the family bank account? The answers to these are different in the US and Japan, and they're different now and in 1990.
https://www.japan-talk.com/jt/new/okozukai
Of course, everything is changing in a rapid pace.
I hadn't realized the rest of the developed world had moved past such things already..
I think we'll see a lot of women begin to capitalize on this in larger and larger numbers in the next year in things that are generally not associated with women (military things, video games, strength training, etc.)
“otome” as a genre by the way is little more than living out a phantasy of being highly sexually desirable. It's part of the bizarrely popular “harem” genre in Japan, which comprises fiction and video games whose entire plot can be surmised as “The entire cast of attractive characters all fall in love with the protagonist and seem to exist for no other reason than to fall in love with the protagonist.”. — there seems to be a somewhat larger male than female market for this, but the female market is still quite large, and it's as much trash as my description would suggest. — it is really nothing more than plotless wish fulfillment.
The drawing in the article of the many is very indicative of the otome harem, indeed.
In any case, this article speaks as though they hit some kind of untapped hole in the market, but it's a drop in the bucket.
> auctor [from another comment of yours]
Where did you learn this style? What effect are you going for here? Are you from a non-English speaking country? An especially fussy part of Britain?
Your English looks flawless, except that you seem to wish you could replace some English words with related Latin words.
Similarly, you will find me favor the spelling of “lim” over “limb” or “hole” over “whole”.
I actually object less to “author”, than I do to “limb”, as many actually pronounce it as it is spelled, but with “limb” it is introducing a silent letter without any etymological justification, simply because other similar words such as “lamb” are spelled as such with etymological justification, as the “b” was once pronounced there.
> phantasy
As well.
I'm also really curious about the writing style and choices.
... Or pretending to be one? It's that too meta?
It reminds me of savvy car companies in the 1980s who realized there was a huge untapped market for cars that appeal to women. So the best way to deal with that was to bring in female designers.
I'd imagine the effect is similar here.
After all, this was never the case in old media; the investors/producers, directors/editors, writers, etc. of most women’s magazines, TV shows, etc. are mostly men.
Why wouldn’t the boy’s club carry on?
Maybe they're not calling the shots on content in quite the same way as TV executive, but they're definitely the ones getting rich off of it, anyway.
From run-of-the-mill influencers to professional makeup artists and drag queens.
I found that unexpected and very fascinating.
That said, it doesn't mean that those new creators couldn't still be "successful" in such a situation. Just that someone else with more money is still making more money than them.
For context about this, the overwhelming majority of female-targeted Japanese fiction is written by females and with that I mean that I do not know of but a single example of a male auctor having published anything in the female demographic.
The reverse is not true; — there are a great many highly successful male-targeted works produced by female auctors, by which I mean some of the most seminal and influential works in both action and romance.
I'm not usually a gender essentialist, but there's a certain style of some Japanese media of which I often feel that without knowing for sure I can say with 95% certainty that the auctor is female, but I can never be certain of that the auctor is male.
I'm also not sure as to why it would be cynical. If anything, I would feel that it would be good for marketing if it were known that a male wrote it, because it's as said a novelty and many would want to see it because of that. Perhaps you believe that, as the article suggests, this is actually some kind of new development? Be not misled by spectacular news reporting, as otome games and fiction are a very old and commercially viable market rather than some new innovation. — it is certainly not some new development that someone realized this and there are thousands of such games, novels, strips, television series, audio dramata, and whatever other medium, nigh all of them written by female auctors.
I assume you don't mean Ikuhara, so I'll say that many of the things people like about Sailor Moon worldwide were invented by Ikuhara (a man) rather than the manga author, who was more into adding the things Japanese romances have that tend to offend worldwide audiences like romances with way older men.
Although there's certainly other men who try writing anime for women with LGBT content, I don't know if any of the others are actually very good at it, maybe some KyoAni directors.
What tends to happen is that women start products/media that appeal to women, then as it grows, men take notice. They get brought on in management and finance roles, because they have established connections in those fields (where connections are crucial). And too often, that means importing the cultures that drove women out in the first place, in both old and new media.
I hope we get more stories like this, where the women can maintain control. The article points out that they never took VC money. But it's also because they started out moderately wealthy; they were effectively their own VCs.
Female-specific VCs are going to take enormous amounts of flak if they try, but it may be a route to reach whole new markets. Rather than just turning things pink and or making more dating sims.
the people in the article identified a market and took a risk to tackle it and have success in it, others did not. their experience in understanding the market is likely because of their background. other organizations could benefit from the same thing with inclusion that ignored pedigree, which literally means elevating people to decision making roles that have unfamiliar backgrounds and unfamiliar experience (this is in addition to underrepresented people that do have familiar backgrounds and experience), yes, the worst nightmare for some of you all. corporations are about addressing a market, not placating its employees.
The “old guard” in business don’t take risks. They let others de-risk ideas for them (by executing on them successfully until they find repeatable patterns for success that don’t require a “spark” of creativity), and then come in as a fast-follower with far larger pocketbooks to do the same thing, but better and more polished and at higher scale.
Who wrote most early romance novels? Women. (After, that is, the medieval-era proto-examples that were written by men because only men were taught to read and write.) But, once pulp romance novels became a commodity, who was it that started founding companies like Harlequin to take advantage of the known market? Men. And now those companies, by sales volume or revenue, produce most of the romance-novel content in the world. They might employ many women writers at the bottom level (though sometimes those are men under pen names!) but most of the money is going to the men working for the publisher, the distribution chain, the bookstore corporations, etc.
I don’t see anything stopping this pattern from repeating with otome games. If it hasn’t happened yet, that could just mean that the business model hasn’t yet been sufficiently de-risked for the old guard’s tastes.
Look at any social media company. Employees most men, users mostly women (anyone who buys ads can check this for themselves). The only gender balanced social network is LinkedIn.
Dragon Age: Inquisition demographics (https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/NickYee/20170120/289534/Beyo...) also boasts 48% female which is very high compared to genre averages.
There is likely a lot of untapped market in the RPG and simulation genres if games want to cater more to women. Probably less so in stuff like FPS.
I noticed the girls always drew pictures of houses and family and I thought that was the stupidest thing ever.
So yeah it's definitely the genre, and dare I say definitely in part biological in origin.
What I 100% was not into was:
- all the bullying and exclusion I got from boys when I tried to do or talk about "their things" with them
- the way I was inevitably the one that got called away to help out with one chore or errand or the other
- being scrutinised (to the point of pathologising) for openly being unbothered by violence and gore
- on the flip side, the rather weird expectation that I should or would be open to (receiving) violence and aggression in real life just because I do so on a screen, or that I could not also like teddy bears and flowers and family
- the reinforcement from many of the games (and other media) themselves that these were Boys' Things for a Boys' Club that I was just intruding on
- the step beyond bullying and into actual, pretty vile harassment when I eventually started trying to play or talk about games in a bigger context (i.e. online)
As an aside to the potentially harmful aspect of stereotypes in childhood, I think I could have been more athletic. Not an athlete, mind you, but I definitely had the physical prowess to have learned to enjoy sports as a child. But adults told me I was smart, and the culture told me that smart people didn't enjoy physical activity.
Don't assume that after 3 or 4 years of full-time operant conditioning that there is anything inherently organic about your gendered behaviour.
...huh? Am i missing something? Is there a problem with telling children what gender they belong to?? Am i just being thick? Help me, anyone. Please
TLDR: males castrated at birth and raised as females still had a male gender identity.
There is no controversy behind this in science. Most of this controversy exists in gender politics. But the politics is so strong one of my repliers just assumed I didn’t do any research when the opposite is true. Research indicates gender identity is biological if you don’t know this you didn’t do the research. You can still choose to hold a different conclusion then the entire scientific community... that is your right.
Now I’m not here to start a debate. I couldn’t resist replying to you but for the sake of not starting an off topic gender flame war and violating HN rules I’m not going to respond. Just read the evidence and take what you will from it is just information to add to your existing knowledge.
The two phrases "role" and "identity" are similar enough that within this context I can use the terms interchangeably.
Also please don't go like "I find it ironic that you..." or "I find it interesting that you..." or "I find it fascinating that you still believe..." or any of that kind of language like that. It's condescending and insulting and not to mention manipulative.
If you truly are open minded you'd talk to someone who shares a different opinion than you as an equal rather than refer to them as if you were observing some "fascinating" animal with "interesting" behavior that lives in a zoo.
That's it no more replies. Thread ends here. 100% I swear. Don't ban me, Dang.
I can be definite about anything I want. Additionally, how do you know I haven't already looked at the enormous amount of research?
Either way, the research supports my views in a pretty definitive way.
I'm just saying that game genres should cater to the definite biological differences in interests between men and women.
Do you disagree? Fine. I accept your disagreement. Let's agree to disagree and not let this turn into a gender flame war. I'm not going to reply this thread.
It's somewhat ironic that your participation here consists of a) a thread where you strenuously argue that it is not possible to make definite claims of truth backed by science b) a claim that you know the definite truth about a particular scientific question.
Realistically, since the gaming market is global, no individual will be representative of the market. Japanese women aren't going to know what Mexican women want in mobile games.
Even people playing board games are still gamers. People playing sports are gamers. They just play different game genres than you.
A game is a game.
> Playing a game is gaming.
> A game is a game.
And,yes I am pro regulating video game, especially lootboxes.
I also am for regulating loot boxes, I still do not see how that changes the fact a game is a game.
Because gamblers aren't (video) gamers. They are more people addicted to a mechanic and less about enjoying the medium.
Just my opinion and all. Everyone thinks differently. :)
It doesn't. That's the issue. See Skinner's box. Random variable rewards cause addictive behavior, because of evolutive pressures our ancestors exprienced.
Couple that with a money extraction system and you get a way to easily extract money from people unaware of this 'exploit'.
I don't know if that's true, but it could be either men don't understand as well what attracts female gamers, or they're not interested in making those kind of games.
This seems weird to me, because the appeal is quite similar to that of van life, which has a much more diverse group of influencers.
The first otome game is generally considered Angelique, and was released in 1994.
There is a rather big franchise called Ouran High School Host Club, which started in 2002, which is a parody on the otome genre and assumes that the audience be familiar with it, as it mocks it's clichés.
There is absolutely nothing new or newsworthy about the existence of otome games and some of the comments in this thread really make me aware of how every news article appears accurate, safe for the one about the subject one happens to be somewhat knowledgable in oneself.
It makes me realize that most likely I have also been making such comments from other news articles, not realizing how much the article was sensationalized dreck news that attempted to arouse a false impression.
This is really not remarkable; otome games and fiction are common place and a big market indeed.
It's as though it be præsented as news that some firm made a first person shooter.
It's a shame they weren't able to leverage their resources to add first-hand information to the report.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wotakoi:_Love_Is_Hard_for_Otak...
If all that was required to make a huge company without taking VC funding was to make romance games for women and that’s a such an easy thing to do why was the niche so underserved? Or it wasn’t underserved and they were extremely good at it? Either way I don’t think the implication that people like sex means that these romance games were easier to make or easy to make appeal to women.
2.) Despite being massive market amd financial success, romance is the most looked down at and despised genre. People just know it is stupid, regardless of whether they played or read piece in question. (See also universal "it is porn" dismissal regardless of whether the actual piece is smut or not).
The article makes it seem as though it be a unicum, a new hole in the market dived into.
Otome as a genre is old, and has been commercially viable for a very long time, and there are tonnes of products in it, not merely video games, but books, television series, theatre dramata and so forth.
The anime exist but don't really seem to be too popular, even if the games are big. Diabolik lovers, Amnesia, etc. I think the female market is too segmented; female fans like shonen sports anime, boys love manga, traditional shoujo, yuri, and otome content.
I've heard stories of all-male teams trying to localize a Japanese game like this and changing all the parts women liked because they couldn't take them seriously.
On the male side, there's a lot of bad visual novels that are trying to "improve on" or "take down" what they imagine are Japanese dating sim games, but have nothing to do with actual Japanese games because they've never played any of them, and so have little real appeal.
Yeah, sex/romantic relationships are quite base and easier to sell than say universal paperclips about paperclips.
[1] a clone of a Japanese game called Kantai Collection, which did the classic JP move of accidentally becoming super popular and dealing with this by refusing to improve anything and hoping their customers would go away.
Ah, I meant the non-explicit ones. But note that the space has a lot of overlap with r18+ ones that are usually browser-based, but may have hybrid clients (including iOS ones for the sanitized clients but share the same account); DMM Games and its r19+ brand Fanza is a market leader in publishing them.
Games are still sex filled escapism. News at 11.
This isn’t some opinion peace of the few either. The modern versions of Jumanji featured Karen Gillan in a sexy hot pants and a tight top as a direct parody of the clothing worn by female characters in computer games.
It’s just western content: anime is frequently male oriented. There’s even a thing called “fan service” where popular anime’s pander to the lusts of male audiences.
Obviously people will chip in with examples like Factorio and Sim City and yes, I agree that not all computer games are sexist. But a lot already are and it’s an established trope that has been called out many times in the past.
(I appreciate this is written from a heterosexual perspective. Obviously I’m not suggesting that women can’t enjoy male-orientated content and visa versa)
I don't think any degradation is intended. It's just an interesting fact.
People refer to the "Winklevoss brothers" they don't appear in headlines as "Twin brothers...". They're refered to by their name, as well as the fact they're brothers - it's easier to refer to the fact that they're both Winklevoss and just say Winklevoss brothers. Whereas in this headline, the sisters' identities are erased- they only exist as twin sisters with no identity.
In all these examples - Winklevoss twins, Collison brothers, Wright Brothers, Property Brothers, Marx Brothers, Brothers Grimm, Russo Brothers... they all actually name the brothers.
The title of this article is really weird - it anonymises the businesswomen and attributes their wealth to the work of other people. I don't object to it strongly, but I do think it's a kind of backwards way of writing the title. This title could be perfectly applied to some charity kickstarter run by female gamers for some twins that are in need.
But twin sisters? There are way too many of them to count.