Video Games are Strictly Targeted to Men

Question

In a world full of video games, a claim that resonates in people's minds is a generalization that the gaming world promotes their products to only the male audience. An article by Deirdre Coyle addresses, "In most conversations with gamers, "real" is synonymous with "hardcore." These games have big development budgets and require hours of player dedication to complete," in this quote she articulates that her male roommates told her to play a hardcore video game with violence, over a simple mobile game. To every male, the only video games that exists are ones about sports or violence, but actually every app one downloads onto their phone is considered a video game, hence why it is called a "game" in the app store. No matter a persons gender, they play video games everyday so video games should not be directed to only men.

Answer 1

I'm going to answer this question/statement with 3 sources, including the one linked in the original post, but also my knowledge of being a woman who is heavily into the gaming community via all gaming platforms. Now, what I can tell you from my standpoint is true online gamers are most usually those playing on a platform (Xbox,PS,PC,Switch) these are our main connection platforms because the big tilte games run through all of these platforms and have opened up the floor to crossplatform gameplay. Now, if you were to ask a dedicated gamer someone who's been playing on a platform for a long time, they would say, Mobile gaming does not make you a gamer. Personally, I side with this opinion. The reason is because there is no big tilted game that is truly rooted in ESPORTS or modern gaming, so we don't classify "mobile gamers" as true gamers, because you havent played a brig brand title that is very important to the community.

A small clarification is that you have 2 points that aren't exactly connected in the way you think. If you are a male and you only play mobile games, you're not a gamer, same goes for women. Mobile gamers of any kind or gender are not deemed actual gamers, and that has nothing to do with your gender. To further add to my knowledge, I have been a gamer and heavily involved in multiple gaming communities for over 13 years. I also play on our main platforms besides Switch.

Now the big deal here is males have always been the audience for video games, and there are many ways to point that out ,rather through nit picking, some games and their customization options depending on what gender you choose to play as, or if there aren't different gendered lead characters in solo games. There are any different things we could nitpick at, but let's go for the big headlines that have been talked about for years now. 

I took this quote from a little further down than where it was grabbed in the original post, and the reason I'm inserting it, is to have you understand an outside understanding of more mute pallated gams. 

"Often, they don’t even have too many colors: in a hardcore game like the blockbuster first-person shooter Call of Duty, the color palette is so dominated by greys and browns that the brightest color you’ll see is the red of your enemy’s blood after you shoot him." (TNR)

I think this is honestly really comical in the way we are talking about Call of Duty, or more commonly known as Call of Duty Black Ops. One thing is actually the camos in this game, whether that be your weapons you choose, or the armor you wear, is extremely bright. I personally wore a bright orange, green, and neon yellow outfit on my character when I first played the game. Also, you don't really see that much blood... This quote kind of just tells me this person never actually sat down to play the game themselves for multiple hours on end... like the rest of us have. But the point they are trying to make is "women don't like mure color pallets" which I think many women do like calmer color pallets or more muted tones. I personally don't want a game jumping at me with different shades of pink if we want to go there. 

Now pulling from my second source, this quote explains the foundation of gaming in the 70's "When the gaming industry first kicked off in the 1970s, they weren’t marketed toward a specific gender but as family entertainment. Early games such as Pong and Computer Space were considered unisex and never marketed toward boys. Atari’s first female games developer, Carol Shaw, began her work in the late ’70s, becoming well known for games such as 3D Tic-Tac-Toe and River Raid with Activision."(GameLuster)

now we know games were orignally marketed for families and not toward any gender, like we knew heavily in 2016 when the mysognistic ads were popping up pretty frequently, which brings me to my next pull of Razors new ad they just launched for a new set of headphones, the ad was essentially a women expressing her dissapointment in her boyfriend as he then slipped on the new noise cancling headphones and went about his day as she followed and kept trying to yell at him. It was and is a big setback for this brand since they have made a lot of products dedicated towards women and are now experiencing a lot of backlash. 

"A new advertisement from Razer is making the rounds on TikTok and proving, yet again, that old-fashioned sexism in gaming is alive and well. Though meant to help promote the tech company's noise cancelling headphones, the ad instead reinforces the stereotype that women--who make up 48% of all gamers, by the way--simply can't stop talking."

What really makes this just so out there is Razor makes cute accessories for women and then turns around and makes this a few weeks ago, 

"Accompanied by the caption 'Don't let yapping get in the way of your winning,' the ad (first noticed by PC Gamer) depicts a man and woman sitting on a couch together. The man, both holding a controller and wearing a headset, awkwardly shuffles as the woman emphatically speaks to him. After a few moments, he decides to activate the headset's Active Noise Cancellation feature. The woman's voice is drowned out, while the text on the video reads: "Active Noise Cancellation: On, Drama: Off." As of October 23, the advertisement is still up on TikTok."

So in conclusion from what we can see that yes marketing and video games have now transitioned havily into being male oriented and in modern times have now been shifting away from that perspective but some brands as in Razor are reminding us of where we came from in that fire and that the ash and embers are definitly still lit. 

Works Cited Page (in order of appearance)

Coyle, Deirdre. “Why Are Video Games so Gendered?” The New Republic, Nov. 2017, newrepublic.com/article/145594/video-games-gendered.

Powell, Dougie. “Why Are Games Marketed toward Boys?” GameLuster, 14 Nov. 2017, gameluster.com/why-are-games-marketed-toward-boys/.

‌Cogswell, Jessica. “A New Razer Headset Ad Is under Fire for Its Negative Portrayal of Women.” GameSpot, 23 Oct. 2025, www.gamespot.com/articles/a-new-razer-headset-ad-is-under-fire-for-its-negative-portrayal-of-women/1100-6535662/. Accessed 1 Nov. 2025.

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Answer 2

One consequence of this generalization was brought up by reddit user blocked_memory in the thread r/GirlGamers (https://www.reddit.com/r/GirlGamers/comments/16b799c/why_are_there_no_games_marketed_directly_for_the/) where they mentioned that any video game that is anyway marketed towards girls are also marketed towards kids and everyone else. There are no "girls games" the way that there are "boy games". When you search up girl's games you get things akin to how to be a homemaker. There is a culture of deep rooted misogyny that is barely hidden at all. 

Answer 3

This claim is false. I fact checked this by researching, and finding that according to an article by Theesa the split between genders is nearly equal at about 47% women and 52% men. Further, as the age gap goes up women actually play more than men, with boomer women making an astounding 52% and boomer men only 46%. Overall given the evidence of the large amount of women who play video games and the gender ratio being essentially equal, it wouldn't make sense for video game industries to solely target men. This makes the claim that "video games are strictly targeted to men" false. 

Source:

https://www.theesa.com/annual-esa-study-reveals-video-games-universal-appeal-across-generations/#:~:text=Players%20represent%20every%20demographic.,%25%20women%20and%2052%25%20men.

Answer 4

I can't really say that this claim is true nor false. I found an article on Digital America about the exclusion of women in video games. I found claims that female characters are often designed to be over sexualized by a male audience. There are also stereotypes within the gaming community that men are equipped with more technological skills than women, therefore making them better at video games. Many video games have little to no diverse options for women when it comes to character customizing. Men get many body types to choose from while women may feel that the only representation for female bodies are the same ones that are over-sexualized by the gaming community. While this is all definitely true, I feel that this is classified as an opinion as many women in the gaming community may feel different things about how included they feel in the gaming scene.

Source:

https://www.digitalamerica.org/the-male-domain-exclusion-of-women-in-video-games-kayleigh-connor/