The problem is, the straight men who made up their core audience are not the loud voices in the online community. They listened to those voices, the ones who said FemShep is the BEST PC EVAR, and not the metrics that said 80%+ of players were rolling male Shepard soldiers. Take it a step further -- the BioWare forums shut down, the community gathers on Reddit and the ruins of Tumblr, and ends up coalescing in areas where those straight white men are either unwelcome or outright banned if they challenge the groupthink in any way. They wound up in a bubble and made no effort to see if that bubble reflected the people who would actually buy the fucking game rather than endlessly moon over cosplay and muh representation and cringe-inducing romances.
I think that’s just a problem with BioWare games, maybe RPGs in general.
Casual male gamers are not going to be posting on these fora, or writing loads of fanfic or drawing fan art. They’ll buy the game but they won’t read the codex entries, theory craft about lore hints, and all of that.
There are male nerds that do that-but they are always going to be a tiny minority of the audience and the most enthusiastic online fans that engage with the material as above are going to be female or at the very least men who don’t just play the game and move on.
BioWare tried appealing to the (largely female) hyper fans in concentrated online communities-the sorts that actually did write loads of Solavellan fanfic. In a lot of ways-DAV feels geared to this audience.
The casual players also aren’t going to be talking to the devs on Tumblr or twitter and they aren’t going to be asking questions like “so is Lavellan immortal with Solas in the magic prison or will she die”-casual gamers just don’t care about that sort of lore and character drama. Female(and extremely online male) fans do.
In fact I’d probably hazard casual male gamers don’t really care about the story/character elements that much. They just like the combat, nice tits on the female characters and maybe some cool one liners. Which is why ME has a much larger “casual” audience.
-This was actually the problem Gaider and co. Had in Inquisition when it came to Kieran. Most players simply didn’t do the dark ritual. My only guess as to why. Is they skimmed through the dialogue and hit the reject option, without paying attention.**
**A lot of gamers aren’t actually engaging with say, the story. They are fast forwarding through the “boring” dialogue to get to the next fight sequence. That is the unfortunate reality.
I think that may be an instance where “woke” and “anti woke” do in fact favor the woke-the sort of person that cares about say themes and characterization and the plot even, is probably going to be more willing to play different classes and races, to read all the codex entries, to think about their decisions. Whereas your average anti woke gamer-just wants entertainment. Swords killing monsters, hot women with tits, and nothing else. That intersection to me at least explains why BioWare in particular pandered to a minority of liberals and women-that for Better or worse engaged with the narrative.
Ideally you can do both-give the casual gamers their violence and titillation and have something for the hyper fans to chew on. But for whatever reason, BioWare ceased to be able to thread that needle. Maybe because they had to make increasingly difficult choices about what to keep or not on the basis of player statistics.
