InTheOnlineAsbestosSuit
Look, Ma! Two Heads!
sickfuck_diablo said:
See, if you people knew about marketing, you'da figured this out a while ago heh heh. Videogames, like all other products, are typically made for a specific Target Audiance. Example: I see lots of 9-16 year old girls playing The Sims, because that's probably the group the game is marketed to specifically. Consider where we see advertising: on Spike TV (tv for men, for those of you who don't have it), you see advertising for action games with lots of violence and mayhem, or racing games etc etc. But if you watch shows aimed at younger kids, like Spongebob or Blues Clues, you'll see adds for games like Mario Cart and The Sims.
Let's think about this as though we are Interplay's marketing devision. Fallout 1&2 have a pretty specific target audiance: they are RPGs, so they are already going toward the RPG playing crowd. They are also PC games, so we cut out half of the game consumer crowd since thats the console game people. The Fallout games are violent and involve guns and combat: while this is not nessesarily something women are universally not interested in, I think we can all agree that more men like this than women*. And a third variable in Fallout's target audiance is age range, which is probably the broadest scape of the videogame age demographic (probably something like: 10-25 year olds), and then cut up because of the violence in the game to the 'mature' rating crowd (17-25). So now we have Fallout's target audiance: 17-25 year old male RPG players. This is why you see far more guys playing Fallout than girls. The number of girls who enjoy playing violent RPGs is much smaller than the number of guys that do, so the game companies will market the game toward guys since they stand a greater chance of making money that way. Advertising is expensive, so they are going to put it where the majority of the people who will buy the game will see it, and since the majority of people buying the game will be men, you see adds for these games in Maxim magazine rather than Cosmopolitan.
*By nature, women are typically less agressive and testosterone driven then men, because in our Ape days of ancient times, males fought over women and then fought to protect them. So now in today's modern society where combat is not requiered to survive in everyday life, men need other outlets to let out their natural agression, IE fast cars, action movies, and violent videogames.
