@Gomtor A marketing company that writes off even 10% of the potential market is not doing their job correctly. It's irrational not to have a focus group that reflects potential markets. That's how they learn how to get products to appeal to larger numbers of people.
@Hurvl I think this has less to do with game companies being sexist (which is often alleged) and more to do with marketing companies that have a ridiculously outdated impression of what gaming culture is like. Game companies trust their marketing companies too much, thinking that the marketing professionals know what they're doing. They frequently do, but with a subculture like gaming, they don't. They don't get it. They don't belong to it.
I'm happy to see Naughty Dog actually smack them around a bit. Marketing people will keep going by their prejudices so long as they keep getting paid for them. Stop paying the idiots who don't understand gamers, and start paying people who do.
@sune_Gem Absolutely. One reason why game storytelling has always been so damned flat is the unwillingness to expand the protagonist's relationships beyond the romantic when it comes to women. Just this one development gives the story so much more nuance and depth. It's not just that it appeals to women--it appeals to anyone who wants to play a game with an engaging story.
@SecularSage Focus groups do tend to be entirely too narrow when it comes to creative content. And you're absolutely right--male gamers have no problem at all with females on the cover. And not just in romantic leads. Put a kid sister character on the front, and it's going to trigger all sorts of complex emotions and thoughts. Gamers aren't troglodytes. We're people with interests beyond killing and screwing. I have to wonder how Naughty ended up with this particular marketing firm.
Marketing people can be slow on the uptake. The only reason I can think of to remove Ellie from the game box is that it might suggest to me that I'd be escorting this girl around the whole time. I hate escort/protect missions. From the gameplay I've seen, that's not really the case.
Nevertheless, this marketing team ought to be fired and blackballed. Games need a wider market to be financially viable. If women aren't playing games, maybe there's a reason. The marketing people ought to be finding a way to make the game appealing to women, not writing them off completely. I have a hard time believing that the marketing people actually did this, because it's so basic to marketing philosophy--these guys are simply incompetent.
@stage4saiyan Moving to the x86-64 platform means that developers will have a much easier time porting games from PC to PS4 and the new Xbox. Which means that PC games will not be held back nearly as much as they have been the last six or seven years by consoles. Backward compatibility is only important for the first six-months to a year of a console's existence. I'd rather them make the right CPU move for the future rather than choose one that latches them too firmly to the past. I'm going to play my 360 games on the 360.
@andrew_ribbons It wasn't exactly easy--the 360 couldn't run every game the original Xbox did, and they required downloadable patches most of the time. In the end, backward compatibility wasn't offered for every game. They could still offer some, but I doubt they'll be making huge promises about it.
@Redsyrup @ferrarimanf355 No, the Xenon Power PC CPU in the Xbox isn't an x86 chip. They're completely different architectures, and not compatible. The Xenon is also 64-bit, not 32, if I remember correctly.
Isn't this basically saying that the PS4 and Xbox Whatever are going to have the same basic architecture--ie., a semi-custom AMD x86 with multiple Jaguar cores and integrated Radeon graphics (http://www.tomshardware.com/news/APU-Jaguar-PlayStation-Kabini-Temash,21229.html)? They might be customized in different ways, but they'll be far more similar to each other than they were this last generation.
And even if PS4 manages to be substantially more powerful (which, given this news, I'm starting to doubt) it means that issues with console ports should be greatly reduced. And that means lower game development costs. Which is good for everyone.
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