Game developers risk losing women over online culture

The video game industry is in danger of alienating a huge portion of its potential customers – with the majority of women feeling developers are not doing enough to combat harassment in their products. The result is that far fewer women are long-term gamers than men – with many feeling neglected by the gaming industry.

For many years, the video game industry has been painted as the future of entertainment – in terms of storytelling, social interaction and even sport. However, after a boom during the pandemic, the industry finds itself in the makings of a slump.

Sales are slumping.  But since then, after factoring in inflation, game revenues have been falling off. In the US, gaming revenues for 2023 fell 2.3% over the previous year, while globally some experts estimate shrinkage of 1.5%. And that’s not just because developers are shifting fewer new units. Gaming usage is also falling – having hit an average of 16.5 hours per week per gamer in 2021, that was just 13 hours in 2023.

With an industry increasingly dependent on micro-transactions in pre-existing games to turn a profit, that fall is bad news. Bad news which has seen game developers already resort to brutal cuts in their headcount to try and preserve profitability. The games industry shed 8,500 jobs in 2022 and a record 10,500 in 2023, according to figures reported by Business Insider – but that record could easily get eclipsed in 2024, with 6,200 layoffs in January alone.

This might mean companies will shield their bottom-line for pre-existing properties, but it could also be about to deepen the crisis. By mishandling talent in such a massive way, developers and investors may be hurting their long-term ability to generate new revenues by creating new games. They might instead escape from this scenario of diminishing returns, by trying to better cater to a portion of the market they have long neglected: women.

Hostile environment

A new study from Deloitte suggests that a long-standing elephant in the room – the hostility and bigotry of online communities – is costing developers dear, when it comes to retaining women as customers. A survey of more than 2,100 gamers by the firm has revealed while 47% of men spend most of their time playing a couple of live-service (online multiplayer) games, that figure falls to just 29% in women. Meanwhile, 69% of men polled started playing games over 10 years ago, that is just 51% in women.

Something is seeing a disproportional drop-off in women playing video games. And that something seems to be the culture of online multiplayer games – which can be huge revenue generators for gaming companies. This may be reflected in both the fact fewer women spend large amounts of time on live-service games, or stick with gaming for longer than a decade.

This seems to become more apparent when asking gamers directly about their attitudes to online gaming. Deloitte asked gamers whether they thought game publishers should do more to combat harassment in their game servers – and while majorities of both men and women agreed, that was 4% higher in women. Similarly, 4% more women said online multiplayer games had too much bullying and harassment.

More men than women said they would be more likely to play a multiplayer if it was moderated to limit bad behaviour – but the positive response was more than four-in-ten on both fronts, so hardly grounds for inaction from developers. But most strikingly, women were much less willing to tolerate abuse. When asked if they thought bullying was just “part of the gaming experience”, only 19% were willing to agree – in contrast to 30% of men. This suggests that by taking wider-ranging efforts to kick bigotry out of their products, developers could revitalise their engagement with women – and bring in new revenues at a time when they sorely need new funds.

What might happen if they fail to do so may be seen in the now doomed world of the metaverse. Having struggled to find ways of moving beyond perceptions that the technology was just a playground for bigots, the metaverse has been widely binned by investors and users alike – in spite of insistent experts having billed it as the future of commerce as recently as 12 months ago.