UGAACCIDENTALS

Continuing from my previous post. I’m curious what genres girls specifically would be interested in. There is a lot of overlap with Rock Band, TF2, etc type games that are enjoyed by both genders. However, what is the Call of Duty for women? What genre would attract almost exclusively women but still be main stream? I think this is the question a lot of game developers will be asking themselves in the near future. There is truly a huge untapped market for games targeted towards women. I don’t mean Barbie’s Playhouse type games though. The type of game I mean hasn’t been created yet but whoever figures it out first is going to be rich indeed.

Lately I’ve been noticing a lot more girls playing video games. While this could simply be due to voice chat becoming more popular making it possible to know who is a girl I think it’s more than that. Games like World of Warcraft, TF2, Rock Band, etc are focusing more on topics that girls find fun or interesting. It’s becoming apparent to me that girls do not like war simulators that try to mimic reality. It might be that girls have never been into video games as much because the game genres or topics have always been male focused as that was the percieved “primary market.”

It looks like Valve has added hats and miscellaneous items to the game that you can equip your character with. Although these don’t have any stats yet I’m curious if they’ll try to make TF2 more like an MMORPG where you can progress or somehow earn items with stats to upgrade various classes.

This would be hard to pull off though considering the original marketing of the game which doesn’t appeal much to MMO fans. A small amount of it might be bearable though if the items were easy to unlock in terms of time commitment. I sure hope they don’t keep a random drop system though with stat items.

I just recently found out about TF2 gather games and let me tell you they are great. Join the GameSurge network on IRC and join #tf2.gather.us. Once in the channel you can !add to get queued up for the next match. Once 12 people have added the IRC bot will randomly assign you to teams and give you your IP/Vent information for the match. This allows you to play competitively without having a dedicated group of people you play with. Basically, it’s a pick up game but with CEVO rules and players of higher skill level (usually). Check it out.