Play like a girl — embracing and welcoming women gamers and audiences
This year, Google launched a report titled “Play Like a Girl” that focused on the increasing importance of female gamers and published numbers (see graphic below) around female participation in gaming across Asia. It drew attention to the fact that women have been a huge catalyst for growth among the millions of gamers joining the ranks every year. The number of female gamers in Asia is growing faster than male gamers, and they are keeping up on revenue contribution!
NewZoo says 46% of gamers globally or 1.2b gamers are female! But archaic gender stereotyping has meant that video games are associated with young males and reflected in-game designs and characters. There is an over-sexualization of female characters and under-representation of female protagonists. In 2019, a US-based survey showed that only 19% of game developers identified themselves as female, resulting in gendered content in gaming. Up to 54% of US gamers say the diversity of characters is vital to them, and gamers tend to identify with characters that look like themselves.
The female gamer persona varies significantly from the male gamer persona per NewZoo. 67% of women gamers fall within just three gamer personas (i.e., the Time Fillers, Cloud Gamers, and Popcorn Gamers). Time Fillers are as high as 36% of all female gamers, while only 19% of male gamers. Male Gamer personas are a lot more diverse and spread across 3–5 personas and are likely to be more Cloud Gamers (21%) and Ultimate Gamers (15%), who spend a large part of their disposable income on gaming.
In esports, fewer women are part of both the audiences and teams. Momentum Worldwide reported that 29% of esports fans are women, and 62% of female esports fans do not believe brands market to them. According to WomenInGames.org, 71% of respondents say women aren’t represented enough in esports and gaming.
Missing role models, fear of sexism, and gender-specific socialization together with non-perception of women as a target group are widely noted as leading reasons for lack of female participation. Dozens of women came forward this year to publicly cite harassment and abuse, leading to this widely circulated Medium post.
Facebook Gaming and Twitch have set out new guidelines to protect gamers from cyber-bullying and create more inclusive communities. Twitch has also started banning users following protests about abuse.
The Super Smash Bros. community became another group with a plethora of sexual assault allegations against key players in 2020, signaling that some of these concerns apply to minorities beyond women, including, sadly, minors.
With younger gamers coming online, ensuring that these gaming communities are safe and inclusive needs to become a bigger priority for streaming platforms, game developers, and publishers alike, especially if they are to appeal to young female audiences and keep them engaged.
Esports has also had its share of struggles with diversity and inclusion. By default, esports is gender agnostic and designed for men and women to compete on an equal footing. But it seems strange that despite this, all-female teams are being formed rather than actively encouraging mixed-gender teams. This year, Could 9, one of the most valuable brands in esports, started an all-female squad to field women and built a talent pool. They did admit that the intent is to have the best players, irrespective of gender, play for them and that their ultimate goal is to have only one combined gender team. I would agree that a start is better than inaction.
2020 did move the needle forward for women in gaming and esports. AT&T launched a $50k prize for women game developers. Dignitas, the esports organization that the Philadelphia 76ers NBA basketball team owns, launched an initiative (called _FE) for championing opportunities and education for females in gaming. “_FE” represents the long-time abbreviation used by esports players and teams denoting femininity. And just this week, Envy Gaming has announced the launch of a new content creator network and ambassador program, kicking it off by signing chess Twitch streamers Alexandra and Andrea Botez of the channel BotezLive. The sisters have amassed 473k followers on their shared Twitch channel and have appeared as commentators for the popular influencer chess competition Pogchamps.
Nearly one-fifth of the games announced in 2020 had female protagonists. At Sony’s June 2020, Play Station 5 presentation, dubbed The Future of Gaming, one-third of the games had central female characters as part of a conscious effort to win these audiences.
Valkyrae became one of the biggest female live streamers globally and signed an exclusive YouTube Gaming deal. She recently won Content Creator of the Year at the Game Awards 2020.
As the industry scales and grows, becoming inclusive and building games, keeping in mind, female audiences will improve audience engagement and commercial success. Globally, women contribute to 38% of the gamers and 35% of the revenue. In India, there is a significant lag, with only 18% of gamers being female. This is driven by the fact that internet users are still majority male. The divide is even larger in rural India, where only 31% of users were female. During CoVID lockdowns in India, female time spent on gaming grew 64% versus 43% for men indicating the pent-up demand and interest in gaming by female audiences. “Poker-Dangal,” a popular casual poker game in India, reported that its number of female users surged by 500% in 2019 — and more than 80% of those users were younger than 25 years old.
But before we point too many fingers at building inclusive gaming content and hiring women to do so, there is a larger issue in India. While much has been spoken about India’s smartphone penetration and low mobile data costs, very little attention has been given to India’s gender gap in mobile ownership and internet usage. This graphic illustration below sums it up. India lags behind both Latin America and Africa in mobile ownership parity. The gap is worse when it comes to smartphones, critical for mobile internet access, and digital inclusion. The gender gap in smartphone ownership has remained at around 60% in India since 2017.
However, it is worth mentioning that all three leading mobile operators — Airtel India, Reliance Jio, and Vodafone Idea India — have made commitments as part of the GSMA Connected Women Commitment Initiative to reduce this gender gap. The top barrier cited to owning a mobile phone is affordability, followed by literacy/ ability to use. Considering that 95% of female gamers across Asia prefer gaming on mobile, it is critical to solving the ownership and accessibility gap at the earliest to cast the audience net wider and make gaming truly inclusive. F2P, casual and hyper-casual mobile games that remove transacting barriers and do not require high degrees of skill and literacy can be especially amiable in embracing and welcoming this first generation of smartphone-owning Indian women to the world of gaming.
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