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Millions of Women Will Make Fortnite a Billion-Dollar Game

48 points by petethomas 8y ago

FrozenVoid 8y ago
More indepth article from Kotaku https://kotaku.com/fortnite-mobile-is-becoming-a-battle-of-the-sexes-1824109975 https://kotaku.com/fortnite-mobile-is-becoming-a-battle-of-t...
kbar13 8y ago
> 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.
- hood_syntax 8y ago
  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.
  - tudelo 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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.
      - swerveonem 8y ago
        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.
  - omfgwhat 8y ago
    Fortnite is harder than Overwatch, especially when considering characters like Mercy. In Fortnite you must be able to build while playing a hitscan character. It crossed into the mainsteam because of distribution. It's free and available on mobile devices.
josefresco 8y ago
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?
- myaccountforhn 8y ago
  I'm afraid I can't provide better insight. However it does appear to be popular in the amateur porn scene.
- megaman22 8y ago
  Where would someone see this marketing imagery that they mention? I don't think I'm particularly living under a rock, but if I didn't follow Barstool Sports on Twitter, and thus see memes about guys ignoring their girlfriends to play Fortnite, I would have no idea that this game existed.
- jbob2000 8y ago
  Pure anecdotal speculation here - Fortnite lets you build stuff and customize appearances. In video games that have strong female followings (The Sims, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, etc.) both of these features are front and center. Couple that with strong social features (multiplayer + mobile phone) and "marketing buzz" and I can see why this is attractive to women.
  - Splines 8y ago
    I don't know if I buy that - Fortnite is still a shooter at its heart and anything you build is extremely short-lived. Compared to Sims/Minecraft/Stardew Valley, where your creation lives on for the entirety of the time you spend with the game.
    - jbob2000 8y ago
      I agree, it is short lived, but I think it's more about the feedback loop of "collect/earn then build" that is attractive, not the permanence of the creation. Whereas shooters typically were about the adrenaline rush of the fire fight, Fortnite has more variety of gameplay.
FussyZeus 8y ago
> 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.
- zrobotics 8y ago
  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.
  - FussyZeus 8y ago
    Like any other situation where tons of big players with big budgets are doing a thing that seems stupid, it's because it does work, even if stupid, and because none of them want to "risk" being the studio known as the one that makes the "girl games." Doesn't help that historically games aimed at girls are just... atrocious. Not even talking about the themes or whatever, I mean simply from a software and interactive standpoint, they're just godawful point and clicks. Edit: Let me be VERY clear here, I'm not blaming girls or women for this AT ALL. Just saying that the shovelware-to-quality ratio is a LOT worse on the more girly end of things, stuff like the Barbie games, animal-centered games, etc. There is nothing wrong with making a game centered around being a model or whatever the hell, and you could probably make some pretty interesting ones with what are traditionally strong female interests. Just saying that a lot of what has been made is pure and utter dreck.
myroon5 8y ago
I think the game being free attracts a lot more casual gamers, myself included
282883392 8y ago
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"
- cfadvan 8y ago
  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.
  - nerdponx 8y ago
    Eh. I don't buy the "women play games" argument. Why weren't they able to write this article about Dota 2?
    - tmpz22 8y ago
      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...
xenihn 8y ago
Starsiege: Tribes had both male and female avatars before it was cool. I miss it so much. The successors are all dead player-wise.
taurath 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
  - taurath 8y ago
    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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
bovermyer 8y ago
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.
matt_s 8y ago
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.
to_bpr 8y ago
Will make it a billion dollar game? Is it not a fad, likely to die out like any other?
- afskkginio 8y ago
  Of course it's a fad. That doesn't mean it won't make billions of dollars.
- purple-again 8y ago
  It won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. They just recently announced $100,000,000 (not a typo) of prizes for the upcoming year. Lots of pros that snubbed their nose at it over the past few months are now doing half Fortnite streams ok top of their core game as they try to see if they can be competitive
- Reedx 8y ago
  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.
cuddlypsycho 8y ago
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.
GuB-42 8y ago
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.
- omfgwhat 8y ago
  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.
  - tmpz22 8y ago
    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.

48 points by petethomas 8y ago

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

kbar13 8y ago

> 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.

hood_syntax 8y ago
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.
- tudelo 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
    - swerveonem 8y ago
      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.
- omfgwhat 8y ago
  Fortnite is harder than Overwatch, especially when considering characters like Mercy. In Fortnite you must be able to build while playing a hitscan character. It crossed into the mainsteam because of distribution. It's free and available on mobile devices.

josefresco 8y ago

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?

myaccountforhn 8y ago
I'm afraid I can't provide better insight. However it does appear to be popular in the amateur porn scene.
megaman22 8y ago
Where would someone see this marketing imagery that they mention? I don't think I'm particularly living under a rock, but if I didn't follow Barstool Sports on Twitter, and thus see memes about guys ignoring their girlfriends to play Fortnite, I would have no idea that this game existed.
jbob2000 8y ago
Pure anecdotal speculation here - Fortnite lets you build stuff and customize appearances. In video games that have strong female followings (The Sims, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, etc.) both of these features are front and center. Couple that with strong social features (multiplayer + mobile phone) and "marketing buzz" and I can see why this is attractive to women.
- Splines 8y ago
  I don't know if I buy that - Fortnite is still a shooter at its heart and anything you build is extremely short-lived. Compared to Sims/Minecraft/Stardew Valley, where your creation lives on for the entirety of the time you spend with the game.
  - jbob2000 8y ago
    I agree, it is short lived, but I think it's more about the feedback loop of "collect/earn then build" that is attractive, not the permanence of the creation. Whereas shooters typically were about the adrenaline rush of the fire fight, Fortnite has more variety of gameplay.

FussyZeus 8y ago

> 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.

zrobotics 8y ago
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.
- FussyZeus 8y ago
  Like any other situation where tons of big players with big budgets are doing a thing that seems stupid, it's because it does work, even if stupid, and because none of them want to "risk" being the studio known as the one that makes the "girl games." Doesn't help that historically games aimed at girls are just... atrocious. Not even talking about the themes or whatever, I mean simply from a software and interactive standpoint, they're just godawful point and clicks. Edit: Let me be VERY clear here, I'm not blaming girls or women for this AT ALL. Just saying that the shovelware-to-quality ratio is a LOT worse on the more girly end of things, stuff like the Barbie games, animal-centered games, etc. There is nothing wrong with making a game centered around being a model or whatever the hell, and you could probably make some pretty interesting ones with what are traditionally strong female interests. Just saying that a lot of what has been made is pure and utter dreck.

myroon5 8y ago

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

282883392 8y ago

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"

cfadvan 8y ago
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.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  Eh. I don't buy the "women play games" argument. Why weren't they able to write this article about Dota 2?
  - tmpz22 8y ago
    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...

xenihn 8y ago

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

taurath 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.
- taurath 8y ago
  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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

bovermyer 8y ago

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.

matt_s 8y ago

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.

to_bpr 8y ago

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

afskkginio 8y ago
Of course it's a fad. That doesn't mean it won't make billions of dollars.
purple-again 8y ago
It won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. They just recently announced $100,000,000 (not a typo) of prizes for the upcoming year. Lots of pros that snubbed their nose at it over the past few months are now doing half Fortnite streams ok top of their core game as they try to see if they can be competitive
Reedx 8y ago
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.

cuddlypsycho 8y ago

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.

GuB-42 8y ago

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.

omfgwhat 8y ago
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.
- tmpz22 8y ago
  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.