EVE General Discussion

Except if you knew the first thing about business you'd know that almost every business outside wholesale and barn-retail have a demographically niche that they cater to because... that's what they're good at.

Rolls Royce doesn't market cars to those with a 15k budget and if they did make a bargain car, there's absolutely no telling if their engineers and marketing department could make that vehicle success. Now, on the larger scale, some companies have multiple branches that cover many different niche markets, but those are independent products with their own engineers, managers, marketers, etc.

tl;dr: There are and always will be demographic differences between varying products and services based on the wants and desires of a disparate human population. Such is life. Any supposed business person who believes that perfect age, gender, ethnicity, etc. etc. appeal by their product is something to aim for is a completely idiotic dunce who failed to grasp a single word of their education and imbibed a bit too much of the cultural progressivism that pervades the political sphere.

THIS.

If you go to other geeky things, women are not 50% there.

Now, whether that is to do with "Girls cant be engineers" crap or whether it is because they just arent interested is a whole other debate (which is an interesting debate to have, but, on GD it will turn into something completely different), but....the % of guys who are as geeky as most eve players is a small % (And, lets face it, a lot of us players were the ones who were super geeky at school), and, within that subset, women are an even smaller %.

I'm convinced it's just women trolling, I know tons of females in game (confirmed on voice). I think it's just them getting really into the shadow nature of the game itself, pretending to be male, and ... honestly, doing it right. Keep it up ladies.

Nor encouraging ladies to act like men to "fit in". I was raised in a much different time, and I'm not going to resort to cussing like a sailor and dry hump to "fit in" with 15 year-old males (which are jailbait to me even 20 years ago).

It's not that the ladies can't do the "job", it's that the "job" doesn't fit the interest. The trendsetters that came before endured through the mess, but it's still...4% (or more likely 10%). That 4% still are the wives or girlfriends or the few women who took to gaming decades ago (your stereotypical geek girlz). The bulk of womenhood isn't into it, because it doesn't appeal to what they prefer to do.

Now I'll PvP and play FPS games here and there for variety (can handle my own), but do I really enjoy it to play most of the time? No. Killing pixels isn't as rewarding as building and nurturing pixels. It seems guys enjoy destroying pixels, the ladies prefer to build them, much like raising kids or pets or gardens. And that is prefer, their interest, and what would even bring them to the game.

It was the intricate crafting (that reminds me of what MUDs offered) and market in EvE that attracted me to the game. It wasn't the PvP (for that I can hop into any FPS game, a genre designed just for meatgrinding...and without the drama seen in MMOs...and costs nothing but the game to play). Is it fun to play that sidegame in EvE, though? No. And it's because it's like too many crafting venues in MMOs it's tacked on, the main activity is combat so that 96% of the males are happy and not bored.

So the game is made by men, for men...and it shows. It's not going to attract women by design that way. The women don't exist in the game design to even make it appealing in the first place (or if they do exist, they're the stereotypical ladies who will offer the 100000001 pets and mounts. The lady that resembles their wives or girlfriends...). So how will the devs know what to build to attract women when even they are handicapped by their working culture and environment?

Now I do like what SOE is doing to encourage women getting into those design ranks (and not just in the art department...), especially production leadership positions (whoa...Affirmative Action...W00T!). And it must be working, as that game there's plenty of women there, and VOIP is more representative of the general population. Raid of 10, 4 out of 6 can be women). Dominio there started as a gamer, got a job with SOE to be the crafting dev, and moved up to the production ranks. That's an inspiration to see, and that game doesn't feel like cavemen designed it now. I just wonder how EQNext will become due to the input and direction.

So until game development resembles more traditional businesses and their gender makeup, it will remain 96% male to attract 96% males. Which is okay, but if a business wants capital, there's 51% of the population with disposable income, too...that remains untapped.

Hiding their identity as a female just to fit in is not "doing it right" at all.
Nobody should feel that they have to hide who they are just to be able to play a damn video game.
There are several women that I know of in my alliance and they all fit in just fine. I imagine there are plenty of other alliances that are much the same in this respect. Nobody says "**** or gtfo". Nobody tells them to make sandwiches. Honestly there are jokes sometimes but not really in any context that can be considered sexist or immature. We're more liable to make jokes about having sex with goats...

Do, do you know what E.G. means? OR...wait, did you even read what I wrote?

Or did you just skim my post, saw some numbers and made some blanket WILD accusations that I expected/wanted an even split in game demographics. Representative player base of your target demographics != a wild even ratio among gender demographics.

Wait, you're still trying to use big words and fancy business jargon to dress up your pseudo-intellectual bash on a post you didn't read, congratulations, can we move on now that you've gotten your rage-rocks off.

This. Men joke around ALL THE TIME with each other and laugh it off. If you aren't questioning your buddy's sexuality or calling him a **** ****** then something is wrong.

Alright, so let's treat it like a business case. First of all, gamers are not split 50/50 in gender. Yeah, you can get me actual stats, etc. Gotcha. It's those stats that are wrong.

All of those stats, and yes I've read them, are disproportionately skewed to attempt to achieve the assumption that there are a higher number of female gamers than there really are. What their motivations for this are, I don't know.

But I do know how they skewed their stats so hard. They took mobile "gaming" into account and added it to the list. Mobile "gaming" being used for the statistic, and being added into the equation, increases the number of female gamers in the result by a factor of ten.

So when they say that there are 50% male, and 50% female, what they really mean is than 45 of that 50% for women are all playing Angry Birds, Words with Friends, and Farmville.

Idk about you, but they're not real gamers to me. Taking mobile "gaming" out of the equation, you get the result that about 90% are male, and 10% are female.

Nor are the mobile "gamers" a demographic that it is wise to court into playing EVE. First of all, this game is harsh as hell compared to just about any MMO out there, in that we still have a death penalty (penalty for dying). So it's not for casuals. What are the demographic of players of Farmville and Angry Birds? Casuals, major casuals.

EVE is not for casuals. That's why I like it. That's why a lot of people like it, because it's damn hard.

[Edit:



Completely false. Most modern economics teaches the precise opposite actually. "total appeal" products either do not exist any longer, or their market is inundated with the already established products.

Catering to a niche, as EVE has done for a decade, has kept them in business when so much of the potential competition has died. Think about this. EVE has seen off nearly every MMO in the last decade go Free to Play, or die entirely, or is WoW.

EVE is one of the very few Pay to Play business models still out there. So starting your assumption that we need to change a working model, is a poor idea.

Men of EvE calendar?

NVM, scratch that.

I just find it kind of sad that, in order to be accepted in EVE, I have to "act" like a guy. If I open my mouth and say "Hey, that comment wasn't cool", I get yelled at for starting drama. I've been told not to discuss "girly" things, coz the guys don't want to hear it. I'm expected to live with the "If you don't want to see porn don't click the link", to then turn around and get corp booted for posting a nice looking nude guy.

Honestly, the rule of EVE seems to be "straight male". Ladies either get the "LOL go get me a sammich **** or GTFO" harassment, or worse, crazy stalkers (dealing with two right now, in fact). GLBT....well, in the span of 5 minutes, I saw repeated questions about an FCs sexuality when he flubbed a kill, and multiple pictures of (a very pretty I might add) naked transgender lady posted in local.

Really, ya'll wonder why girls don't want to play.....

I've always lived by the rule of "Don't say it unless you want it repeated to your mother/grandmother/sister." It's good policy.



Now, for you gents who don't engage in those behaviors, I appreciate it. Thank you. My rant is not directed at you. For you guys who step up and say "that's not cool" when your buddies start in, I love ya'll.