As a last ditch effort to lure in the kind of people who wouldn’t be caught dead playing video games, Google executive and head of Stadia’s business development, Phil Harrison, boasted about the “gender-neutral” controller that they have for the live-service.
The Week picked up the news from an interview that CNN conducted with Phil Harrison, where they discussed the upcoming service. CNN Business quoted Harrison and further added their own context to the statements…
“’Some of our historical competitors in the console space have been a bit more masculine and a bit more mechanical in their approach,’ Phil Harrison, Google VP and head of Stadia, said in an interview with CNN Business.
“For Google, the design decision could help its new gaming service stand out from competitors and also attract a more diverse audience. In the United States, women make up 46% of gamers, according to the Entertainment Software Association, a video game trade group. It also points to a possible secret weapon for Google as it pushes into an industry that Ernst & Young estimates will generate $152 billion in revenue in 2019.”
A lot of this kind of misinformation is why Stadia is poised to fail.
The 46% figure that corrupt media outlets tout and prance around like a miscarriage-prone surrogate dancing around in a ballroom with an empty pram, is not what it seems.
The figure encompasses the casual demographic from the mobile market, which is why they claim women make up 46% of gaming. Of course they do… but it’s not playing games like Call of Duty, Borderlands, Street Fighter or StarCraft.
Majority of those users come from the Candy Crush series and other such simplistic fanfare, as detailed in a report by deltaDNA. This is not the audience that will be attracted to something like Google’s Stadia.
Even still, Google states that the design of the controller was made to appeal to males and females alike, as opposed to chasing after a design that was best suited for high-end gaming. The Week wrote…
“In a behind-the-scenes video, Google industrial designer Jason Pi said the controllers will also be designed especially ‘for small and large hands so it’s super usable for a large segment of gamers that aren’t always appreciated.’ Stadia is set to release on November 19 to gamers of all gender.”
Focusing on attempting to make the controller effeminate is not going to lure in females to the device.
Controllers identical to the Stadia’s already exist in droves and you can find plenty of them on Amazon by searching up “Android controller”. Let me know how many of those reviews are written by women.
Of course, Google is fully converged. The company has already brazenly admitted to trying to fix the 2020 elections, and nothing about the Stadia is pro-consumer. At the end of the day, attempting to capture a segment of the gaming market that doesn’t exist will do little more than allow them to have one of their products appear on the Get Woke, Go Broke Master List.
(Thanks for the news tip Ebicentre)
