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What Can CCP Do To Get More Women Playing?

CrazyKinux posted an EVE Banter question of what can be done to get more women to play EVE?

What could CCP Games do to attract and maintain a higher percentage of women to the game. Will Incarna do the trick? Can anything else be done in the mean time? Can we the players do our part to share the game we love with our counterparts, with our sisters or daughters, with the Ladies in our lives? What could be added to the game to make it more attractive to them? Should anything be changed? Is the game at fault, or its player base to blame?

The demographics are given like this: 70% of gamers are male. 62% of online gamers are female, and yet... only 5% of EvE's population.

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canhasgank
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Honestly I seriously doubt those demographics unless you count Farmville as online gaming. 62% of online gamers are female? Then what are they all playing?

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19 answers

  • 3

stitcher [ Editor ]

I suspect the EVE community's "OMG A GIRL A/S/L LOL?" attitude doesn't help much.

A player's a player in my book, gender not important. Unfortunately what we have is a 95% male playerbase a great many of whom are guilty of this kind of unconscious misogyny that says that "women are important, we need more of them". That's not to say it's the single greatest contributor, but I can't imagine that it improves things or encourages female players to stay. I know that if I joined an MMO and discovered the player base was 95% female and I immediately became an object of poorly-disguised interest, I'd feel uncomfortable.

No offence OP, but I suspect that it's precisely the attitude that led to you asking this question that's contributing to the discrepancy. If the EVE fanbase were less concerned with gender, we'd quite possibly see a slightly more even mix.

Obviously, there are other factors as well, but I think this is an important one to bear in mind.

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  • 3

alec grahm [ Editor ]

The first question is one of demographics - what types of players are out there?

The number 70% is being thrown out there for percentage of online gamers that are women. This does have a basis in reality, a few years ago there was a published article "online gaming attracts more women than men" which in 2006 said "Of the active gamers, 56% play games online, and 64% of those online players are women, according to the study."

This needs to be taken into context with the following quote from the article:

While women are dominant among online gamers, men still outnumber women in the overall video game space by more than 2-to-1 (70%-30%). Older females make up the largest percentage of casual gamers, usually playing online card and puzzle games. Thanks to casual games and the emergence of massively multiplayer online games, 64% of active gamers play on a PC. About 24% of active gamers engage in gaming on their mobile devices

It appears the majority of the female gamers are in this "older female" set that are more casual. This fits with what I have personally seen.

Eve is anything but a casual game. It can be played casually, but at its heart it is cutthroat in space and the market. Not a click fest, but not something you can sit back and relax with.

There are other mmo games that are much more appealing to the casual demographic. One that I can think of that does grab a reasonable percentage is a puzzle oriented world (even foraging for stuff has an interactive puzzle), and has the ability to dress up one's avatar (aside: I wonder how Incarnia will change this?).

Things such as the science fiction theme (go to a sci-fi confrence and see what percentage women are there), the higher end system requirements (eve requires more of geek speced system), grinding (be it mining or missions), and things blowing up aren't exactly the things the population of female gamers wants to play.

Yes, the demographics are balancing in the sci-fi world too. A poll in the UK found that it was split even. However, again look at the considerations in the article that point out that this follows a shift in sci-fi programing away from robots and machines (think the eve world) to character based stories (with a leather clad male lead). Compare the current seasons of Dr. Who, Battlestar Galactica and the Stargate franchise to the Tom Baker years of Dr. Who, Battlestar Galactica (the original series), and Star Wars (the original trilogy). You really do see a move from star ships shooting each other to the more social aspects of speculative fiction -- not exactly what EVE offers. Eve is currently a sandbox where people who want to go pew pew with lasers and big ships go to play.

If one was to try to encourage the gamer described in this article, I would absolutely have incarina be a high priority. Furthermore, somehow make the non-combat parts of the game (mining, science and industry, trading) more engaging.

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  • 2

deklan

I think it was on one of the CCP videos that a developer said: "Girls don't want to be spaceships." :P

But you know, let CCP worry about it, this topic is more about money than you think, not about leveling the gender field or something awkward like that. As long as they can "tap into that market" without alienating the male fanbase, I say go for it.

I believe an even larger 1.0 system, with more things to do, more sites to explore, more pirate instances for players to group up and kick some ass, that would help a lot. Make it a PvE game, basically. Also, a more simplified quest journal, keep it simple stupid.

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  • 1

jasper van weerd

Attend game conferences and besides that be around on the online market places of games. For example on casual game portals. 75% of casual games are played by womans. So be there! Especially in the strategic game sections. Make small eve like situations. Offer the top people in a DM an trial account (personal communication). This way woman could be tempted to step in.

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canhasgank
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Again with the numbers and no link or reference… Where do you pull this 75% of yours from?

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  • 1

ubo

I think it's absolutely pointless and absurd to care, or think it's an issue. This game doesn't actively discriminate against women, it just doesn't fit into the stereotype they've been raised to believe they should want to be.

Saying that EVE needs to "do something" to bring in more women is implying that women are some strange mythical breed of beast that has to be bamboozled into a game that is changing for "what they want."

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  • 1

reverend drew [ Editor ]

Simple answer: know your audience.

I'll play along with the crowd here and not give references for my statistics, but a few quick searches will tell you that the inflated numbers of female online gamers all come from casual games.

Last I checked, EVE isn't exactly a casual game. I feel like a casual despite putting in a few hours every evening.

When's the last time this sausage-fest looked forward to a few hours of rom-coms after work?

Generally speaking, women and men have different tastes. There are exceptions, of course (Falca, you rock!), but, pardon the cliche, it is what it is. Forget luring females just for the sake of luring females. Take care of your faithful and pitch the game to those who would enjoy it, male, female, or otherwise.

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  • 0

darinas [ Moderator ]

Definitely a tricky question, as no woman is the same as another - what may attract one to the game will make another turn away in disgust! The only thing I can think of to get more women to play Eve is to lose the Science Fiction angle! It isn't really a genre that appeals to an equal number of males and females.

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noob piratebait
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I think that is also a sign of bad marketing for scifi. I actually personally know as many female scifi fans as I do male ones. I definitely know of no reason that scifi would be less interesting to women than men.

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  • 0

miningzen

Change their game dramatically >.> I'd probably say that the fact that you could die at any minute is a turn-off for female gamers and the soft-hearted, not that there's any correlation.

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  • 0

ks_96

Incarna will be the single biggest draw to females I reckon. Being able to see your own character and change it's appearance will be appealing to girl gamers. There's plenty of them in WOW, Aion, etc.

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  • 0

harlock [ Editor ]

Women are less inclined toward SciFi universes for started (no offense meant of course). Being a Star Wars fan, I can easily see that there is far less girls than boys.

I am sure this helps a great deal explaining why the situation is as it is within EvE Online.

Also I am fairly sure that among the limited amount of girls within the game, most came because of their boyfriend / husband.

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  • 0

falca [ Editor ]

EVE is a complicated game. You gotta have brrrrainnnnsss. Much hi-tech and pvp. And nearly zero roleplaying. That's the point why there are so few women I think.

And I like it that way.

And I am female :p

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  • 0

zothike

Incarna will bring certainly many woman players, but to bring them actually in EVE itself a good way should be with improving planetary interaction, making it more attractive visually and above all introducing population management in it, making one possibLe gameplay for FI like farmville, because extracting ice heavy metals or autotrophs or mixing stuff to get guidance system is less concrete than bringing wheat, water and tobacco to sustain some marines and tourists needs

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  • 0

kazz [ Editor ]

I think theres probably a lot more women playing Eve than the official "statistics" show. How would CCP even know? When I first started playing Eve my husband set up my account and paid for my subscription - there was no mention of my being female on my own account information. Sure there are more guys playing the game but since I got into PvP (ironic?) I've actually discovered rather a lot of fellow women playing the game too.

As for changing the game to suit women - Incarna will probably help but it is not going to suddenly attract a mass of females - Eve appeals to a certain type of gamer, a lot of guys and girls just dont get it, theres nothing wrong with that. Surely having the right type of person here is better than worrying about what type of genitals they have.

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  • 0

werner lucifer [ Editor ]

Basically what Alec Grahm said above. But also adding a bit of story would help. Eve is to much of a sandbox. It needs more story-related missions that are easy to get in to and with a story that follows you through the entire game, and that affects your char, will add more meaning to the sandbox. I have absolutely no scientific explanation for this. It's just a guess.

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king of veld [ Editor ]

Perhaps the playerbase has something to do with it.

I am a man, but I often pick female characters in games (if I have to stare at a character's face or butt while playing, I would rather stare at a pretty face or butt). So, out of habit, when I started playing eve, I made an attractive female character. Within 30 minutes of joining my first player corp, I had a socially inept 13-year old boy striking a conversation with me in corp chat and asking me all sorts of uncomfortable questions, clearly acting on the assumption that I was the same gender as my character. To me, it was funny; but if I was a woman, it would have been pretty uncomfortable, and a number of such experiences might well have led me to not resubscribe after the first month.

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