The Last of Us developer, Naughty Dog, had to fight their marketing company to get them female play testers for the upcoming survival horror.
After discovering the list of player testers was entirely male, creative director Neil Druckmann stepped in to change it and instead have the play testers be made up of both men and women alike. Druckmann tells The Escapist:
“Another aspect that influences how a game is promoted is focus-testing. Players are rounded up and are asked to view materials and answer some quantitative and qualitative questions about it.
“My big surprise during this process is that the research group wasn’t planning on focus-testing female gamers – it’s something we had to specifically request. I hope this is a relic of the past that will soon go away.”
With the recent increase in strong female characters in big name and successful games, the attitude to women in games seems to be beginning to change. Both Crystal Dynamics and Irrational Games have displayed female characters in pivotal roles in their games and both were received extremely by fans who supposedly, according to publishers and this particular marketing company, don’t want female characters in games.
Just last month it emerged Capcom’s upcoming title, Remember Me was rejected by numerous publishers who had wanted the game to feature a male lead instead.
