Why do publishers avoid female heroes?

Publishers have often been critisiced for staying away from female protagonists, and the developer of the upcoming Remember Me has given some insight into the perceptions of publishers on picking the fairer-sex as leads.

“We had some [companies] that said, ‘Well, we don’t want to publish it because that’s not going to succeed. You can’t have a female character in games. It has to be a male character, simple as that,'” said Dontnod Entertainment’s creative director Jean-Maxime Moris, regarding Remember Me’s female hero, Nilin.

“We wanted to be able to tease on Nilin’s private life, and that means for instance, at one point, we wanted a scene where she was kissing a guy. We had people tell us, ‘You can’t make a dude like the player kiss another dude in the game, that’s going to feel awkward.'”

Moris explained that the studio found it bizarre that most publishers would refuse a game purely due to having a female lead.

“I’m like, ‘If you think like that, there’s no way the medium’s going to mature,” Moris said. “There’s a level of immersion that you need to be at, but it’s not like your sexual orientation is being questioned by playing a game. I don’t know, that’s extremely weird to me.”

Looking at the situation from a business perspective, a previous report from consulting firm EEDAR revealed that out of 669 current-gen games, only 24 featured women as protagonists.

“If you look at the first three months, with the smaller quantity of female-led games, they did not sell as well. The ones that were male-only sold better,” explained EEDAR’s COO Geoffrey Zatkin.

In terms of marketing budgets, “games with a female-only protagonist got half the spending of female optional, and only 40 per cent of the marketing budget of male-led games. Less than that, actually,” added Zatkin.

What’s your opinion on the matter? Does a female or male hero change the way you perceive a game? Let us know in the comments section below and in the MyGaming forums.