Crackdown 2 will not feature female agents

I can't tell if you're joking or not, but I certainly hope you are. There's a ridiculous amount of sexism present in games today. The only games I can recall in recent memory where the main characters were female are Final Fantasy XIII, Metroid, and Portal. You get a choice of sex in a few RPGs (notably Pokemon and the Bethesda and BioWare games), but other than that pretty much every game has male leads.

Mind you, I don't really have a problem with Crackdown 2 avoiding female agents, since it's done for technical reasons. I just can't help but wonder if the fact that most gamers are males has to do with how we treat female characters in games.

Quiggy, it's not about sexism, it's about targeting your audience. Moore gamers are males, so more game protagonists are males.

It's no different than how most action movies have a male main character, and most romantic comedies have a female main character.

Or do you also believe that script writers for romantic comedies are extremely sexist people as well?

Vcize, if you actually look your statistics up, you'll notice that there are 30% more adult females that play video games then there are teenage males. Get your facts straight and maybe learn a thing or two about making games. Kthanks.

Teresa, are you being serious? I can't tell if you're joking or not, because your post is so ridiculous.

For starters, what does "teenage" have to do with anything? Most game characters aren't teenagers. We're talking about number of males playing games vs. number of females playing games here. And the fact of the matter is there are a lot more males playing the games we're talking about here.

Secondly, those "statistics" you refer to, aside from their accuracy being very questionable, are talking about a completely different kind of games. We're not talking about Nintendogs, Breakout, and Wii Tennis here (not that that's the only kinds of games girls play, but that makes up a much bigger part of them). We're talking about Crackdown here, and you can't seriously sit here and say that the majority of people playing this game won't be males. As is the case with most of the games that we see this brought up about.

FWIW, my wife is a gamer. Her favorite game is Gears of War. She read your post, and she said that she thinks your post is "one of the dumbest things I've read on the internet in quite a while".

Vcize, Your wife is probably a butch female, that's why she enjoys Gears of War so much because she probably identifies with the characters. It's simple as this, there are female gamers out there and the amount of female gamers is increasing quite quickly. Sales will drop if you don't include certain groups of gamers just because they are in the minority. You need to aim your game for as wide of a spectrum as possible, and not just say "We aren't going to include females." Because the developers are lazy.

To be more clear on the numbers, the NPD reported in 2008 that the number of women gamers was 23%, also noting that "gender balance was much closer to equal in handheld consoles". The number has also risen with the success of the Wii and DS (which means the new girls in the hobby probably aren't playing a lot of games like Crackdown and Killzone), which coincides with the huge rise of extremely young gamers (ages 2-12 are now the largest demographic according to the NPD).

With handhelds being nearer to equal and making up such a large part of the market, that means the percentage of female gamers on consoles like the 360 and PS3 must be extremely low to make the overall number land between 23-28%. Of course, that much was obvious to anyone with a brain and not deluded by their own agenda, but you fall into the latter category so I guess explaining it was necessary.

Now, if you'd like to make some sort of wager that the number of people playing Crackdown, Mass Effect, God of War, or the majority of games we're talking about here will be anywhere near 50/50, I'm listening. But I'll give you a pro tip. It would be an extremely bad bet for you.

Seriously, is this what the world has become now? People are so scared of being labeled a stereotyper that they'll ignore even the most obvious thing if it could someone be twisted into someone saying that about them?

Look, most of the people who play Crackdown will be male. Not all of them, but most of them. If you can't figure that out, then you're just stupid, stubborn, or both.

And Teresa, I'm still waiting for your answer. Do you consider the script-writers for romantic comedies to be sexist? Do you consider the script writers for action movies to be sexist?

Vcize,

The thing is, you did not properly read my post. I stated that there are more -Adult Females- not girls from the age 2-12 then there are teenage males (which people believe to be the opposite) that play games.

I also did not state that the majority of people playing this game would not be males. It's quite the opposite, but if you want more people to play your game then you should not scrap the one thing that most women identify with. It has been proven that females will be more likely to play a game if there is a female character that they can identify with, and to push it further they want characters they can customize. You can probably kill off more than half of the females that would even look at the game by not including a simplistic thing as a female avatar.

And yes, I am a female that does not find it hard to say that they want a female avatar. I'm sorry, I'm not a dude and I don't want to play one.

As for your question...
I love action movies as much as I love romantic comedies, and no some horse riding barbie game is not my favorite game. So, needless to say you know my answer.

Vcize, the main character in a movie script is set in stone, so yes of course in most cases they're going to go with a character that their target audience can identify with, and that often means matching sex to the demographic. Videogames don't have the same restriction. e.g. I can attest to Mass Effect playing equally well no matter the sex of the main character.
To say that Crackdown isn't "for girls" isn't sexist, necessarily, but it is needlessly dismissive and probably not a great business decision. I mean, given the stats you just supplied, wouldn't it be in developers' best interests to at least increase the accessibility of their product to a rapidly growing female market?

They aren't but the new team has members from the original game on the staff. There are a lot of Crackdown's programmers working on the new title.