Women don’t sell! These are Ubisoft’s words when it comes to why they haven’t put a woman as a lead character in most of their games! It is also why we got gender selection in the Assassin’s Creed game, some of which I spoke highly against! However, what would compel Ubisoft to make such an outlandish statement like that?
I mean, we have games such as Horizon Zero Dawn (10 million sold), Beyond Good & Evil ( est. 52 million sold), Resident Evil 3 ( 3.5 million sold), Tomb Raider series (75 million sold) , Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (1 million sold), Bayonetta (700,000 sold ), Nier: Automata ( 4 million sold), Dishonored 2( 2.5 million sold) and Mirror’s Edge (2 million sold), all revered as amazing games and praised for the portrayal and gameplay of their characters and the narrative they told. It is beyond me how anyone could sit there and make such a blatant lie of a statement…unless they were looking at the sales figures. And I ironically, every game mentioned sold reasonably well.
However, not as well as Ubisoft’s would like them to sell! That was enough for them to conclude that male gamers simply arent’ interested in games that feature females as lead! It’s such a close-minded way to think, yet since Ubisoft is a business, money talks and they listened.
When you look at games like Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (15 million sold), God of War (10 million sold), Spider-Man PS4 (13.2 million sold), Assassin’s Creed Origins (15 million sold) and Resident Evil 2 (5 million sold) for example, those numbers seem to look kinda crazy and somewhat prove the executives at Ubisoft right! However, despite that, I still think it’s majority fucked up to just outright write-off potential female leads in Assassin’s Creed game. With a good, strong narrative you can make any lead character great! Of course, keep in mind that the games with the male lead mentioned above are following a legacy so they do kinda have the advantage there.
There’s no denying figure here, it’s clear that male lead character sells more because the video game space is dominated by men. That’s just a fact! However, I don’t agree with just out not trying to showcase women if game developers want too! It bothers me that Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was meant to star a lead female, I would’ve preferred that than what we got today! Some might say historical accuracy, which I get, but if they wrote the story in a believable manner, it can be forgiven.
Of course, Ubisoft as a cultural is messed up anyways so their word kinda doesn’t hold up as much!
