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Comment by Abraln | Hacker News Reader

I am still trying to find how they defined "gamer". Does a mom obsessed with candy crush count? Statistics without background can be worse than useless.

Also, adding female assassins would not be as simple as "create a model". Each added character requires dozens of animations (climbing, falling, running, using each weapon), full voice acting for each of those situations (every time "he" is used would need to be re-recorded with "she"), each cutscene would need to be reviewed for timing issues, and the bug testers would need to do everything twice to check for graphical bugs. While they probably could have done it, something else would need to be cut.

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"Does a mom obsessed with candy crush count"

Why wouldn't she count? Cause she's a mom? Cause the game has candy? Or what?

As for female assassins, truth is somewhere in the middle. You don't need to make everything from scratch. Procedural adjustments can be made to the male animations and you can use the same animations for females.

I mean come on, women have a slightly different figure, but they have two legs, two arms, one head and so on. They're humans. It's not like the complaint is that birds and dogs were left out of the game.

That said, I'm fine with women being left out being a business decision. They'll now see what the effects of that business decision is on sales, and have the chance to learn for the next version.

It's misleading because they spend the article talking about mostly console games, but use statistics about mobile gamers.

You don't need to make everything from scratch. Procedural adjustments can be made to the male animations and you can use the same animations for females.

Here, here! Look at the animation in the original Rainbow Six--animations were used across genders, and it worked fine.

Maybe she shouldn't count if you're writing an article about why there are so many female gamers isn't there a female character in Assassin's Creed. My mom is in her mid-fifties and just got an Android tablet to read ebooks and is now addicted to Candy Crush. By that ESA study's standards she's now one of the ~50% female gamer demographic. She is not going to transition into a "hardcore gamer" even if more "hardcore" games have female characters. The statistic is just not useful in the context of the article because "female" contains a lot of disparate demographics.

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