
Millions of Women Will Make Fortnite a Billion-Dollar Game - petethomas
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-29/millions-of-women-will-make-fortnite-a-billion-dollar-game
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282883392
This is a poor article. Props to Fortnite for having a higher percentage of
female players, but the article doesn't provide any legit justification for
it. An inside source providing vague information doesn't really help the
legitimacy of the article.

The game isn't as much aimed as females as gender neutral. Without spending
money there is a random chance that you play each match as a boy or girl, and
the idea that "when you play as a girl character, guys will help you” is
complete bs.

More important to the games success (and it's higher percentage of women
playing) is a lower barrier to entry than other more hardcore games such as
PUBG or Battlefield. The game was designed to be easy to get in to, and is
available on almost all platforms. This more than anything has led to it's
smashing success, not "women characters"

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cfadvan
The sad truth is that for all that it seems to be popular here, Bloomberg is a
rag and it almost always shows. They start with an agenda and work lazily
backwards from that. Fortnite is f2p, and massively popular, and a lot of
women play games. Therefore, a lot of women play Fortnite, but that doesn’t
support their foregone conclusions or let them shit out an article.

Welcome to Bloomberg.

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nerdponx
Eh. I don't buy the "women play games" argument. Why weren't they able to
write this article about Dota 2?

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tmpz22
They probably could've mentioned exactly that if they took into account South
Korea, where gaming is much more engrained in the culture and shows less of a
gender divide - but then they would have to do research and gather domain
knowledge...

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kbar13
> Fortnite is also subtly different from existing shooter games, in ways that
> may specifically appeal to women more than other titles do. It’s relatively
> easy for first-time players, and it looks more cartoonish and less gory than
> its rivals.

ehhhhhhhhhhh

people who weren't really into gaming in the past are all up in fortnite now,
male or female.

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hood_syntax
The only difference between this and Overwatch going by those criteria is that
OW is not as easy for first time players. You've hit it on the head, the key
difference is that somehow Fortnite crossed the boundary to mainstream.

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tudelo
I wouldn't even say the game is easy... The aiming system rewards good players
heavily and the building system requires a lot more actions for a battle than
something like pubg. I personally stay away from it because the instant
building aspect is too hard and annoying to be fun.

I have a feeling the bigger motivation is that its f2p.

~~~
tialaramex
The Battle Royale format is _fun_ even if you aren't technically very good.
I've written about this before but it does seem to escape even some people who
play _why_ this is fun.

Normally in shooters the best players dominate the game session you're in.
Unless you're one of them, your experience is frustrating because mostly
they're either killing you, if they're an opponent, or killing the people you
were trying to kill, if the dominating player is your ally.

But in Battle Royale modes every game you're in will involve you dying only at
most once.

For the dominant player they often don't die at all, a game lasts say 20
minutes and they might kill a dozen or more other players out of a hundred,
then they're victorious. Hooray - they might do that two or even three times
in a row. Amazing way to spend an hour.

But somebody like me - who isn't very good - doesn't last twenty minutes. They
might win one or two fights, hide, get some cool stuff, but soon they're
outmatched and... they die and can immediately start a different game. So for
them an hour is maybe 15-20 games, each of them exciting and different, maybe
they killed a few people, and the deaths, whilst not _fun_ per se, are over
very quickly and you're straight into a different game.

In terms of why it would attract women. Everybody else being an anonymous
enemy plus the "one death and you're gone" dissolves a lot of nasty abusive
social stuff. Global chat would be pointless, you can't spawn camp people, you
can't even tell if you see the same person twice usually because players don't
have name tags.

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swerveonem
The large map when compared to a CS or OW map provides a large variety of
environments in which to battle. How many times can you run Dust_2 before you
are bored, battle royale you just land in a different part of the map.

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josefresco
But why? From the article it seems the difference was the marketing imagery,
inclusion of female avatars, less gore/more cartoon violence, and mobile play.

This seems like educated guessing, anyone have better insight?

~~~
ksec
I have no idea, PUBG Mobile also had lots more female playing and I asked a
few times all they said was "It is very exciting!", the game is basically the
same as CS, Battlefield or all other similar shooting game.

My guess is that, Mobile has a much lower barrier of entry, no more
"computers" installing and set up, spec to play, complex keyboard input etc.

It is simple to understand, point and shoot.

It takes little time, 15 to 30 min a game. No grinding like WoW. As a matter
of fact there are also lots of female playing LoL as well. But I think PUBG
Mobile and Fortnite is on another level. And these female players, are a lot
more willing to spend on in game clothings!

I have a few female friends who never play much mobile games, and couldn't
understand why man spend a fortune in a game loot. But the first time they pay
PUBG Mobile they decide to buy a nice hat and skirt...... And they asked did
we spend all our money on clothing in games... ( Um.. no )

Another point worth pointing out is E-Sport / Gaming has level the playing
field of male and female. No longer do genetics and muscle define what can or
could not be done. ( Actually they properly still do but much less so then in
real world ) And they are actually quite good at aiming and Snipers.

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Someone1234
I'm male, but as someone with a family game developers really under-estimated
how important it is to have a game you can jump into for 30 minutes or less at
a time.

When you have a family, particularly a young one, you have time but not
contiguous time. Meaning a 15-30 minute game is possible, a 1-2 hour game is
simply not (except perhaps on weekends).

Fortnite, Overwatch, and many mobile games do very well at this. AAA games
often fail due to the level of grinding just to be on par (e.g. Battlefield,
COD) and for single player games it is a mixed bag, some like Far Cry and
Breath of the Wild have gameplay elements (like freeing outposts) that lend
themselves to short burst of gameplay with a small reward.

Millennials are now in our thirties. We have families and kids, we game.
There's a market for this.

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ksec
This a million times. I asked for this like for nearly a decade. And it seems
wired no game studio quite understand this.

Oh, and another thing that was lost in the 20 years we grown up as
millennials. Games are suppose to be FUN. Fun Fun, something we enjoy, not for
wasting our time. Nowadays most games are graphics showcase, poor game play,
little story line, and mostly for hardcore gamers. Zelda is fun, may be more
so then before, but it is now an even rarer breed.

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matt_s
It would have been great if they took the time to interview a few female
players of Fortnite for the article. It would have provided some perspective
into what pulls them into the game.

Is it celebrities that play? character skins? social elements like emotes?

The casual-ness of the game I think pulls in a wider spectrum of people.
Casual meaning you don't need to understand RPG elements, deep story or
history, achievements to move ahead, etc. You just download and play and
everyone is on a level playing field.

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GuB-42
It there any backing behind the "findings" of that articles.

Ok, they say that the proportion of women playing Fortnite is higher that
usual for the genre, which is nice.

However, the rest of the article talks about player avatars. If it matched the
player base, then Dead or Alive would be played almost exclusively by women...
Also look at Overwatch, the most iconic characters like Tracer, Widowmaker and
D.Va are female, Tracer is even a lesbian. But still, it doesn't seem to have
a lot of influence on the player base.

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omfgwhat
Do you play Overwatch? Anecdotes follow from someone that's gamed for 25+
years (I'd love to see data). On PC at least, the amount of female players is
astounding. Most (not all) play Mercy, which seems to be a mix of she's easy
to play for new gamers, plus she's female. Followed by DVA.

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tmpz22
I've noticed the same thing but Overwatch is NOT a good game for casual or
novice gamers because a large percentage of games involve someone getting
upset in team chat, blaming others, huge amounts of negativity, and the
occasional troll spewing racial slurs.

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FrozenVoid
More indepth article from Kotaku [https://kotaku.com/fortnite-mobile-is-
becoming-a-battle-of-t...](https://kotaku.com/fortnite-mobile-is-becoming-a-
battle-of-the-sexes-1824109975)

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FussyZeus
> In an industry known for high levels of testosterone, Fortnite has become
> the hottest game going partly because of its appeal to an unlikely cohort:
> women.

It's worth noting that women have always enjoyed video games, that the hyper-
testosterone driven marketing was an invention to get young boys interested in
games after the huge video game crash.

Ever since then appealing to young males has been the default because no big
players wanted to rock the boat and mess with a good thing, and as a formerly
young male, I was catered to hard and frankly it's gotten old. I'd love to see
some new blood in the industry, and especially to stop feeling cringey when I
watch game reveal shows featuring faux-masculinity, booth babes, and the rest
of the pandering nonsense.

Fortnite is obviously a very casual game. Not saying that's good or bad,
that's up to your taste, but it having mass market appeal is not an accident,
that's what it was _designed_ for. The fact that people find it so shocking
how wide it's appeal is when it was basically _designed to be widely
appealing_ is somewhat disconcerting.

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zrobotics
How is it still possible that so much of game's marketing budgets are still
almost exclusively aimed at male players? For example, Fallout 4 has the
creative building, storytelling, and (much more so in New Vegas, but even in
4) it is to your advantage to play a female character due to perks. And yet I
don't see any marketing stills with a female PC in the first page of Google
image search. This is anecdotal, but I have two female friends who both
continue to play skyrim, but never tried any of the fallout games. The saddest
part is the very vocal outcries any time a studio tries to appeal to women.
Sure, pandering is bad, but there's a wide difference between pandering and
what epic games is doing. Plus, a bonus is that inclusive marketing also seems
to attract more 'non-gamers' in general,leading to their current throne of
cash.

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ravenstine
Have you had the same thought about why purses, hand bags, dresses, and floral
scents are exclusively marketed to women?

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FussyZeus
Purses, Hand bags: Because women's clothing is atrocious with regard to
pockets of usable size.

Dresses: Because women traditionally wear dresses, however, you do find Kilts
on the man-centered end of the spectrum.

Floral scents: I love floral scents and find most scented products intended
for male consumption to be ludicrous, insulting to my intelligence, and
obvious marketing pandering put up around the same Axe-scented products. Also
if you buy tactical bath wipes, you're pathetic until the end of time. There's
nothing un-manly about wanting to be freaking CLEAN and smell nice.

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ravenstine
No, that's not why men don't wear women's clothing. Those are complains women
have about their own clothing(and they're right!). Men don't go walking around
with hand bags and purses in general, in fact I'd guess 99% of the time.
Messenger bags don't count.

Yes, there are kilts, but the vast, vast majority of men would never wear
kilts casually.

I should rephrase that by "without exception", I mean the "vast majority of
the time". There's a reason that products marketed specifically towards men
feature dull/drab colors and tend not to have floral scents. I don't blame you
for how you feel about the products you prefer to use; I happen to buy
products from Lush, which have flowery scents that are nose-numbing. Still, I
don't think that the vast majority of men would use such products. Then again,
if the color of the product was army green and came in bullet casings...
maybe.

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bovermyer
What strikes me as weird is that I liked the Fortnite that came before
Fortnite - that is, the co-op survival mode, not the battle arena mode.

When people talk about "Fortnite," they almost always mean the latter. I'd be
curious to see how the battle arena demographics compare to the co-op
demographics.

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taurath
There’s been a good 20+ years of marketing games only to males - if it’s
finally turning so that there’s not a huge social pressure for any popular
game to be a “guys only” thing, especially in gradeschool then this is a
momentous occasion.

~~~
jerf
There's already substantial markets for games marketed to women, played mostly
by women, oftimes made by women. If you are not aware of them... well...
perhaps you are simply not in the target market and have never received that
marketing.

It's true that they aren't the AAA games, but... I think the AAA marketplace
is substantially skewed by a vicious cycle in which AAA games are expensive to
make, because AAA have to be expensive to make, or big companies that make AAA
games wouldn't be able to defend their turf against the indies, so AAA games
are expensive to make. I wouldn't use the over-used term "bubble" per se, but
I think AAA games is a very distorted market right now and I'm not sure said
distortion can support too much broad sociological analysis.

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taurath
There are plenty, and I’m very aware of them having worked in the industry -
I’m mostly pointing to AAA “Core” gamers (+ esports related gamers) which has
been male-dominated for mostly historical reasons at this point.

An example would be something like Rocket League - there’s only 1 pro that’s a
woman, but there’s no reason the game couldn’t appeal. The core gaming segment
is ever so slowly getting dragged to not being a boys only zone.

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xenihn
Starsiege: Tribes had both male and female avatars before it was cool. I miss
it so much. The successors are all dead player-wise.

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myroon5
I think the game being free attracts a lot more casual gamers, myself included

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cuddlypsycho
What is the problem with making games that appeal to a niche? I'd often find
games that try to appeal to everybody end up pissing everyone off in the end.

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to_bpr
Will make it a billion dollar game? Is it not a fad, likely to die out like
any other?

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Reedx
Popular multiplayer games like this can have very strong staying power,
especially if they become eSports. It's not a minor diversion like Flappy
Bird.

It'll probably last a long time yet. Though anything could happen - a number
of Battle Royale games have come and gone. But they've tended to live on shaky
ground and make player hostile decisions, whereas Epic has a very solid
engine/platform and they make better decisions.

