Should MK have sexualized/skimpy females (costumes)?

There are plenty of "sexy poses" for men. Pretty much all superheroes on posters have their back turned to the camera to flex their back muscles. And they all have very tight clothes around their buttcheeks that you can see very clearly in their flying poses, for example. That isn't sexy? Do men have to crawl on all fours with their ass in the air to be sexy? Not sure what you want.

Men have bigger muscles. Muslces are considered sexy, especially on men. So they show off manly muscles in games. Women have boobs and larger butts, so they show off those in games. It's pretty equal, in my book. Is the problem that boobs feel more personal than manbutts? If so, would it be better if we saw the outline of the penis in the pants of male videogame characters? Would that be sexy?

Realism does not work with fiction.

No I haven't lost the argument. You can easily look it up. Any statistic that claims females game just as much or more than males heavily rely on mobile and social media numbers to pad up the number of female gamers. Some of these statistics even go as far as including any woman that occasionally plays a game on their phone which as a result includes a lot of middle age 50+ women too. You expect me to believe middle aged women are buying things like Call Of Duty and Grand Theft Auto in mass numbers for themselves? It also proves that women tend to play more casual games than men.

This 2017 article from Gamasutra shows the gender breakdown by genre and as you can see women dominate the more casual genres and games. As games become more hardcore, competitive and complex the number of women gaming in those genres decreases. You can find other articles and charts with similar results when they do actual genre and game breakdown and don't just show gamers.

Disparity Between 41% Women in ESA Report Vs. 18.5% In Our Data

The delta between the ESA’s estimated 41% female gamers and our 18.5% is important, but how it impacts the data depends on your interpretation of the cause of that delta. The ESA randomly sampled and dialed up US households, but they don’t provide the details on who got counted as a gamer–e.g., if playing Solitaire last year counts.

What we do know is their sample has a large proportion of casual gamers. In their 2015 report, their most frequent gamers are most likely to be playing social games (31%) and puzzle games (30%). Note that this is their “most frequent” gamers. We can assume that their less frequent gamers are even more likely to play casual titles. So a large portion of their sample may not regularly play AAA titles at all.

Our sample is biased towards core gamers–people who would click on something labeled a Gamer Motivation Profile. But when we’re drilling down to a specific game (like Diablo III in the Action RPG genre), the 41% in the ESA sample is not a meaningful benchmark because a large portion of that sample was likely not playing a AAA game to begin with.

Women only make 23% of the Tekken Franchise fanbase and Tekken is a bigger franchise than Mortal Kombat. Women also make up about 14% of the League Of Legends playerbase as well.

The devs can do what they want but what I and other gamers can do about it is refuse to buy their products until they give us what we want.

"Get woke go broke" does exist. Battlefield V's sales are down 50% of Battlefield 1's. The side scroller MOBA from Nexon, Hyper Universe died after they went about censoring the game to appeal to some SJWs which resulted in thousands of players leaving the game as Nexon didn't even want to compromise and make a toggle setting for the fanservice because they wanted the game "to appeal to everyone" and as result the early players left and the SJWs that whined about the fanservice didn't play the game like they usually do. "Wokeness" destroyed the comic book industry. The wokeness in Captain Marvel was so bad that Disney had to bribe movie theaters into showing nothing but it during its opening week and bought tickets to inflate the box office of the movie to make it look like it is doing better than it really is. Google's parent company Alphabet Inc lost $70 billion because of Youtube's algorithm trying to censor "toxic" and "politically incorrect" content and trying to force the old media down viewers throats when people come to Youtube to get away from the old media. Gillette are facing major drops in sales after their "The Best Men Can Be" ad attacking masculinity, their marketshare in North America went from 71% to 59%

Even if some don't go broke from the wokeness they still produce awful content like Ghostbusters 2016.

I don't really care tbh.

What does bug me, though, is that if I prefer the slightly more realistic and attractive option of MK11 to the cartoonishly laughable big jiggly boobs of previous installments, I am called an SJW.

Sorry guys I am not an SJW or libtard or anything like that, I just prefer hot supermodels in outfits (sexy or otherwise) to anime chicks with huge boobs in bikinis.

The female body types in MK11 is regular women body type, not Supermodel body type.

We both know how the anti-SJW crowd is, just saying.

If you think the women in MK11 are representative of "regular" body types, you have some seriously unrealistic expectations.

For starters, they all have perfect symmetry. They all seem to be in incredibly good shape. They don't really seem to have any flaws, except for the occasional non-human having weird teeth or bug characteristics and so forth (though that's more of a design choice than a flaw).

In fact, they actually used a host of models and actors (aka attractive people) to develop all of their characters.

Yeah, I know. And now I am going to say something that is going to come off as SJW: if you look at the quote from @mkxchrome above, you can see why people in this country/world have body image problems and unrealistic standards. MK characters...normal body types? No no no no

US comic book sales have actually been increasing, from $805 million in 2012 to $1.095 billion in 2018:

Comics and graphic novel sales hit new high in 2018

As for Captain Marvel, that beat box office projections and went on to have the biggest opening of any non-Avengers MCU movie.

In both cases, "wokeness" and diversity have been financially lucrative.

You really think BFV sales are down that much because of boycotts?

"Get woke go broke" is hilarious. People think that is a thing?

Companies like EA aren't selling as much because their games are shit, and when they're not shit, they're stale and redundant.

Companies like Gilette aren't selling as much because the younger demographic that shave these days want a quality experience, not mass-produced disposables. Not that they really "attacked masculinity" but I guess all those non-masculine dudes probably felt threatened by that commercial lol

I'll give you Captain Marvel though, I just saw that for the first time, it was a pretty pointless movie. They could have either incorporated her after Avengers or just let her do her own thing. The new-wave feminism entitlement in that movie was overpowering at times and frankly it just wasn't a good movie. If they really wanted to make a statement, they would have made her single-mom friend parent of a boy, not a girl; then they'd show that it's OK for boys to look up to women. Girls already look up to women, they don't need to send that message any more.

Thanks for your support. LOL

U don't know much about the Fashion Industry as me since I follow it. Supermodels have long legs, skinny frame and are tall, which is not the body type of MK female Characters. The only models that were used in MK11 were just for face scans, not their body type.

Here in the UK, most women are not overweight like they are in the USA.

I don't mind sex or violence in games so much, but it can get weird when you put them too close together. For example, when Jade does her victory pose in MK9 where she pole dances on her bowstaff with a bunch of scrapesand a swollen black eye, that's getting a bit too close to snuff for my taste. But bikini ninjas in DOA don't feel so out of place I think because they get no injuries.

Battle Damage has been removed since MKX. It was only present in MK9, so going by that, MK should revealing skimpy costumes?

@mkxchrome: Still think it would be weird watching a bikini ninja get an eyeball punched out the back of her head.

Realism and Fiction does not go together, they have nothing to do with each other so u can't compare them. Realism = u can relate to. Fiction = u can't relate to.

You know what's funny? The counter argument was how the men were all naked. But umm the men are not naked. Only two are shirtless and its because it fits their character, the rest are clothed, and the men are also not hyper sexualized either.

MK should be designed however the people involved wish to design it.

Nothing was lost by designing them differently.

And films with less diversity tend to do OKAY to average. Shazam, Alita, Solo.

I mean if you want your movie to perform in the average realm...make it less diverse. It's almost like the world is a beautiful mix of so many cultulres and all those people love to see themselves in the movies they watch. Weird.

Hopyfully we make enough noise for NRS to make these changes. Here is a petition to "Bring the MK9 style to female characters in Mortal Kombat 11."

https://www.change.org/p/netherrealm-studios-bring-the-mk9-style-to-female-characters-in-mortal-kombat-11

IGN said NRS added Tremor due to fan demand:

https://uk.ign.com/articles/2015/03/31/mortal-kombat-x-added-tremor-due-to-fan-demand

@Bread_or_Decide: Solo wasn't diverse? Alita's lead is Peruvian too.

@Bread_or_Decide: if you going to blame someone blame Johnny cage. Johnny cage is making all these sexual comments and hitting on most of the females in the game.

It's used to show that the present day cage has matured and grown. Everyone looked at young cage with an eye roll attitude. It's clear that he's meant to show that this is no longer en vogue. It's a smart play on the character. Show how far present day johnny has come with a direct comparison to his older self.

Solo was old school hollywood. Token characters.

Unfortunately yes Alita is diverse but alas, everything gets coded Caucasian because it's not obvious to audiences that it's a non white cast. Then again this is also old school Hollywood, let the audience think non whites are white. Heck, people used to think The Rock was just a big white guy with a nice tan until he started to make it known that his characters are Samoan.

No thanks. I beat the game, the ladies are designed just fine for me.

@Bread_or_Decide: A pansexual black dude is not old school hollywood. The large majority of people knew Rock is Samoan (and black) from his wwe days. They made it pretty clear for everyone. I also fail to see how CM is considered a diverse film with a blonde caucasian woman as its lead yet Alita with a poc lead is not even if it's "coded" caucasian.

Yes, for both sexes.

Anybody saying no needs a fucking reality check.

3116 signers, good luck with that lmao.

LMAO, @NoodleFighter is completely out of touch with reality. Black Panther, Coco, Moana, all with a cast of NON WHITE people were successful. If anything, "wokeness" made things more accessible. Diversity sells. Go back to your chans, you belong there.

Overwatch embraced "wokeness" and was successful.

Assassin's Creed Origins and Odyssey had a diverse, non white, non straight cast.

All successful.

It should be, get woke go rich, because it's the truth. You chan dwellers are a relic from the past.

The problem within MKXI lies in the excessive MTX, nothing else. Actually, it's kinda ridiculous that the female designs worry you people more than abusive MTX.

I never said Captain Marvel was a diverse film.

But it did appeal to women with its message of female empowerment.

Alita was a movie aimed at the absolute worst box office audience (money wise) boys. It starred a girl but only appealed to boys, thus the tepid box office performance. It's almost a fake out, a movie pretending to appeal to girls that really only appeals to boys. And if you don't think it's a boy movie in disguise, see also how the film treats the romance. (Girls worships boys, literally gives him her robotic heart, and then the ending which i won't spoil here)

A token black guy is not diversity. And they always sold Rock as white, nobody even knew his heritage until he made it known, esp for the actual characters he plays now. Diversity is giving a diverse person an actual role in the film, not just being the side kick of the white guy. Here's a good litmus test, if you don't find yourself getting upset over the character, chances are it's a typical hollywood token use of people of other cultures.

Meanwhile, if a black storm trooper upsets you, then it's good diversity. Because it's not a role that makes people comfortable or that they're use to. Real diversity breaks down those barriers. It's purpose is to push hard against norms so that one day the norm will be diversity and nobody will even notice anymore.

why is there a need to make every violent ALL the time?

@Bread_or_Decide: You clearly don't know anything about Rock. He was sold as Samoan and it was made clear his father is Rocky Johnson (a former wrestler himself) he was also billed as the first black person to win the HW title. He was in the Nation of domination lol...

Edit: this was WWE at its peak popularity too, 8-12 million tuning in weekly.

I don't see anything wrong with Alita being in love either, thats a weak argument. Someone supporting their SO isn't somehow bad in any way. It appears you're trying to gatekeep diversity to suite your biases.

As far as what is core to Mortal Kombat.

Let's look at the first game. Sonya was sexy but not hyper sexualized, she wasn't half naked. But the violence did exist.

So the violence is more a part of the core experience than the sexy outfits of Kitana and Mileena which we didn't get until the sequel.

I don't get what people are so upset about, the designers of the game are allowed to change the designs. Times change, those outfits are kind of silly now. Especially with the new tone of the story, and the outfits of sub zero and scorpion have changed dramatically throughout the history of the games.

The romance in Alita is quite toxic and unhealthy, and that Alita never acknowledges it is rather troubling for her character. Again its the kind of "romance" men love and that women despise. I'm just explaining why Alita really isn't diverse and also failed to do anything past average at the box office. It's fake diversity and fake diversity does not fool anyone.

I'm not familiar with The Rock's wrestling days. Only his film appearances.

@Bread_or_Decide: Your opinion of the romance is highly subjective. You trying to pass it off as an absolute fact is silly. Alita also made like 450 million WW, and it didnt have the Marvel train to help it.

Edit: 400 million

Rock was extremely popular before he went to movies. Even then his early movies was stuff like Scorpian King and Be Cool, none of which was he even hinted at being white.

Alita's budget kinda ruins its box office take. Especially since most of it is foreign box office and the studios get a much smaller cut of those profits. You don't hear much talk about an Alita sequel, I'm sure they're glad they perhaps managed to break even and can now make more money in the streaming markets.

@Bread_or_Decide: I'll take your word for it on that.

It took Tremor 5K signatures to get him into MKX:

https://www.change.org/p/netherrealm-studios-make-tremor-a-playable-kombatant-in-mortal-kombat-x

U are the minority. The majority HERE and on Gamefaqs want revealing and skimpy costumes. There's even more ppl that want a mix of revealing and skimpy costumes as well as covered up costumes. Most ppl want VARIETY. Variety is the spice of life:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/253573-mortal-kombat-11/77710660

So much wrong with this post...

Firstly, let's compare the cast and crew of Alita and Captain Marvel:

• Captain Marvel - White male/female directors, white male/female writers, white female lead, black male sidekick
• Alita - Latino director, white male/female writers, Asian author, Latina female lead, Latino male sidekick, badass black antagonist

Clearly, Alita completely annihilates Captain Marvel in the diversity department.

And since you made an unsubstantiated claim about the target audiences, let's actually compare their actual opening audience demographics:

• Captain Marvel - 55% male, 45% female, 47% White, 21% Hispanic, 16% African-American, 12% Asian
• Alita - 60% male, 40% female, 44% White, 21% Hispanic, 15% Asian American, 14% African-American

There's barely much difference between the two. The audiences for Alita were just as diverse as Captain Marvel's audiences.

However you spin it, Alita is a far more diverse movie than Captain Marvel. The fact that so many white liberals hype-up Captain Marvel while putting-down Alita just reeks of oblivious white privilege, ironically. Latinas get far less representation than white women, yet white liberals are too busy hyping-up yet another movie about a white woman while trying to tear down a rare big-budget flick featuring a kickass Latina lead.

As for The Rock, I'm not sure where you were in his WWF days (which is what made him famous in the first place), but most of the world knew he was black and/or Samoan. When I was growing up, I never knew a single kid who thought The Rock was white. You'd have to be colour-blind to think he "looks" white. It's also worth noting that, for many of the non-white kids watching WWF, The Rock was a hero to them. Up until The Rock came along, WWF was dominated by white guys. And then The Rock came along, and opened doors for non-white WWF superstars.

EDIT:

I actually agree with your general point that diversity sells. But some of the arguments you're using to try make this point (e.g. by downplaying Alita's diversity, and claiming that The Rock somehow looks "white") only hurts your argument rather than helping it. You'd have a more effective argument if you did the opposite, using Alita and The Rock as examples of why diversity sells, not the other way around.

whos upset?

Customers are also allowed to provide feedback too.

Sure, but this doesn't really counter my point. What I'm saying is when something meant to be titillating is suddenly juxtaposed with violence, it makes me personally a little uncomfortable. Nothing overwhelming, I enjoyed MK9, and would still play MK11 if they kept with that visual aesthetic, but I prefer the direction they have been going for the past two games. That's my feeling about. It's completely subjective, and you are not wrong for feeling differently.

Don't care. In a way I'm happy MK didn't turn out like Dead Or Alive.

Also if you really want to masturbate in front of a MK game you should load MK9 ( PS3 X360 ) and unlock the stupid costume for Mileena ( the one she has in Shang Tsung laboratory ).

As much as I enjoy nudity (or near-nudity) and sexual themes in my video games, I didn't buy MK9 or MKX because of it. It's almost amusing how much taking out the over-emphasized proportions in favour of more realistic female/male forms triggered gamers so much.

U need to differentiate Fiction from Realism.

@mkxchrome: Well then why do you care how fictional women dress?

What a minute here do you people think that "wokeness" to me is anything that isn't White and hetereosexual? I have nothing against representation and diversity. It is when companies use it as a commodity to win brownie points which as result you get half assed content because they think just being diverse is good enough to sell. There is a reason why people like Miles Morales but hate Riri Williams even though they're both Black people taking the mantle of their previously White predecessors. Speaking of comics @Jag85: do you know what comics are driving the growth of the industry to go back up after it's 10% drop from last year? Because I'm seeing "woke" comics being discontinued and having low sales. The closest thing to a "woke" comic being in top 10/20 sales that I'm aware of is The Walking Dead series.

Overwatch got so "woke" that the LGBT community is pissed at how they made Soldier 76 gay. The okay hand gesture is now seen as a White supremacist symbol and is banned from the Overwatch League even though the okay hand symbol is in the game. 4Chan was able to successfully troll far leftist into believing crap like that so mocking them as a relic from the past that was still able to successfully trick them on such a large scale says more about the left than them. (Before you misinterpret this I have no problem at all with the diversity from Overwatch).

Crap like this is "wokeness" to me

Don't forget branding. Alita is an adaption of an Anime/Manga which in general live action adaptions of generally don't do that well. Captain Marvel is actually one of the least liked characters in Marvel comic books but with how big the MCU is making up a massive demographic of people that don't read comics many people will go out and see it because she is new to them and its Marvel so they trust it will have some sort of quality. Captain Marvel throughout most of her history has been reduced to being a living battery for Rogue which people like much better than her because just about every attempt they had at trying to make her likeable failed.

Nice on calling out the double standards. Brie Larson and liberals are acting like Captain Marvel is the first ever movie to have a kick ass female lead as if Wonder Woman doesn't exist not to mention franchises like Alien, Underworld and Resident Evil. Another thing about the Alita team is that they don't just virtue signal they've actually developed bionic arms for an amputee girl and then brought her to the red carpet premiere in London.

2017 was a statistical aberration. Every year between 2012 and 2016 showed continuous growth. And during that period, there was a big diversity push in comics, indicating that the diversity strategy was working in bringing in new audiences to the comic industry. And then there was a slight dip in 2017 (back down to 2015 levels), followed by a return to growth in 2018. Diversity, or lack thereof, had nothing to do with the dip in 2017. It had more to do with the comic industry's transition away from traditional comic book stores:

Comic sales are down as readers abandon print

There has been a gradual decline in traditional comic stores over the last several years, but a gradual growth in alternative distribution channels such as bookstores and digital downloads. In other words, the comic book industry is no longer being dominated by traditional comic stores like it used to, but it's bookstores and digital downloads that are becoming the new driving force behind the industry. Incidentally, it's the bookstores and digital downloads where "diversity" sells very well:

Comic Sales Figures Prove To Marvel: Diversity Isn't The Problem

In other words, there is no real statistical evidence that "diversity" is hurting the comic book industry in any way, but on the contrary the statistical evidence suggests that diversity has only helped drive growth for the comic industry. Diversity simply means having different comics catering to different market demographics. This is something that the Japanese manga industry had already been doing for many decades to great success: shonen for boys, shojo for girls, seinen for adult men, josei for adult women, and kodomo for children. Whereas the US comic industry had previously catered almost exclusively to boys and men (especially white boys and men), before they started diversifying and creating comics catering to girls, women and minorities over the past decade or so. And there has been continuous year-on-year growth ever since (with the sole exception of 2017).

@NoodleFighter: yeah right, changing the narrative now are we? You people said captain marvel would flop because of get woke go broke and it didn't happen. It didn't happen with the gaming industry. It didn't happen with the comic book industry.

Sorry, "wokenism" brings money.

Deal with it

That's interesting, guess I was wrong about comic books being on a decline. I mostly got the idea that it was declining due to comic shops closing down and store owners saying that comic book companies are publishing things no one wants to read. One of the things you left out about manga is that isn't just diverse in age groups and gender. It is highly diverse in genres while the comic book industry is heavily dominated by the superhero genre. Star Wars, Conan and The Walking Dead are pretty much the only popular non superhero comic book series. Even with all the different demographics shonen still remains the most successful/dominate because even though the demographic is for boys a lot of shonen series can easily appeal to other ages and the opposite sex. For example Dragon Ball and Gintama are both shonen but they're hardly anything a like. Some girls may not like fighting series but they may appreciate a pop culture comedy series like Gintama. Some adults may want to look at a more mature series but don't want to look at something very dark and graphic like Berserk but can appreciate Death Note which is dark and mature but not to extreme levels. One Piece is the biggest cultural phenomenon despite being shonen because it has a balance of things that appeal to almost every demographic on top of a good story. Kochikame which is like The Simpsons of Japan due to how popular and long running is also shonen.

I do give the Japanese credit for being diverse even though don't have to be since Japan is a 98.5% Japanese place and manga and anime are made with the Japanese audience in mind first with some exceptions. Tons of animes and mangas have non Japanese characters in them even as main characters and there is also some LGBT representation. They even make characters that are racially ambiguous so they can be interpreted as almost anything.

Coz I can suspend disbelief.

Street Fighter V done it right: