Why aren't there more game developers making games for women?

[Music] [Music] hello i'm olessa more Alexa from baccarat studia quite sure if I'm talking about designing games for women I'm most more interested in figuring out why aren't fair more studios making games for women so first I need to find a clicker yeah let me tell me do something about myself I actually have to tell you something shocking I'm not a gamer and I imagine that there's a lot of women who don't consider themselves

gamers I never really liked playing games all that much I saw my cousin's playing whatever pac-man and Commodore and Sega Megadrive but I was more interested in watching when playing because I just wasn't very good at playing those games and I wasn't motivated enough to learn to play to play those games well enough to actually enjoy them say I was more into reading books doing other stuff with my time I'm also well quite late entrance to the gaming industry my first years in careers I've just kind of drifted through my career not I I didn't know what I want to be but when I grow up to solve 2006 I ended up at Digital Chocolate working in HR with Aria of Marty : and the youngness knellman and

that was my introduction to the mobile games industry and it was love at first sight first it was just the people working in the industry were so passionate so excited about what we are doing are just so much fun to be with later it was also the games I finally find something but I felt passionate about but I felt I could be excited about and that I could bring actual real value so for me my gaming starts with mobile there's no PC no consoles nothing before that it's mobile fast forward nine years a couple of kids and I started my career I knew in games I joined Turkey based company called app star in 2015 up star got my interest because we wanted to make dress-up game

for girls but was wow wow I never heard about anybody doing anything like that before and felt okay that's a company but I could actually enjoy working in and bring something in it unfortunately after one year up star went down some interpersonal things happened and it didn't go forward but I ended up founding my own studio with four other amazing people and polka dots to do is focused on making lifestyle games for female audience and our first game is a dress-up surprise so before I go forward to my talk I want to tell you a funny story I was at some gaming events with mostly guys and I was telling but yeah studio makes games for females and one guy was like looking at me

he was really surprised and asked like aren't you worried but you are capping your potential of your studio by concentrating on making a game for a minority and I was like looking at him okay why aren't other studios really worried about capping their potential on concentrate in making games for male minority so this is kind of it's a funny story but it tells about the industry a lot so I guess you probably know that women actually there are more women playing mobile games than men we are not minority we are the majority and but women actually spend more time on average they spend more money on average on mobile games and they are more engaged and loyal and what's more it's actually cheaper to acquire a

female player because there's just not so much competition for those players at certain stages but it's also true that women play different games from men women are different so it's also pretty logical ways to play different games at the moment the female audience is in my opinion greatly underserved and there's a lot of pent-up potential like demand for new experience designed especially for females I'm not talking about another match three game I'm talking about a really new experiences there's a lot of Studios innovating for four guys new game modes new things hundreds thousands of new games for men and just kind of a handful of games for females if even vats my previous company app

store is a good example we like we started to do a dress-up game our main artist was 68 years old and she only could do flash and she had already 4,000 different clothing items and 200 dolls made in flash so we did a game with flash arts the game didn't look very good it wasn't very well designed but after its soft launch it generated over 1 million downloads on Android with zero marketing and zero anything so if the female demography is so big and interesting and first pent-up demand there so why aren't there more studious concentrating on this demography it's a really good question I think what's the problem what's the problem I see three reasons what could explain this it's a very male-dominated industry

it's changing slowly at the moment about 23% of gaming industry employees are female but if you take our out web marketing Royals the HR roles and other support roles when you get less than 10% and there are a lot of studios who don't have any females in very game teams and this male dominance definitely has an effect it's it's logical that men want to do games for men they play games for men and they we don't really know about women enough to make games for women second I think making mobile games is extremely prepartion driven most people

working in the industry they really feel passionate about what they do and they need to feel passionate about what they do there's a huge benefit when you are working in a team but it's really passionate about making games and the game that you are making but there's also a minor side effect to that it's hard for me to imagine a guy getting really excited about making a dress-up game for females whoo-hoo let me tell all my friends but I'm doing that yeah I definitely run into this problem when I was searching for my co-founders many programmers were a bit I don't really want to be considered in Finland Finnish gaming industry as a guy who makes games for girls they didn't want so it's was still a thing about and free I blame supercell they had the idea that

best people make the best games and if you give him autonomy when something magical happens and I agree if something magical has really happens and that's a really good thing it's but that also has post some problems more as more studios are following into the footsteps of supercell trying to get the best people together to build the best games to give them autonomy to actually make the best games and if you are trying to build the best possible team you end up unfortunately at the moment with a mostly male team because guys have worked in the industry longer they just have more seniority they have had more opportunities in it and was just like not enough women to fill the roles so that creates predominantly male game

teams who start making games for men I actually happen to know that the game teams that are innovating new concepts at supercell there are no females in that team at all they used to be one but she doesn't want to go back there because they are just making games for guys so how do we get more games for female audience there's no silver bullet to it's it's we need to get even more female game women in the game industry we need more women in every game team we need more Studios founded by women and to attain that the woman need to network more just share our experiences get together and help each other out and be more confident we can actually make it out there we need to have confidence

in ourselves and not to be afraid to try to maybe fail but after that to try again and we need more all-female team starting from the school teams going for indie teams having teams inside of companies imagine if supercell with all their all the resources if they went for forgetting a best female team together gave them the full autonomy and the full resources and know-how of supercell I would be really really excited to see what would happen if they did that so there aren't many female CEOs out there and it took me some time to gather courage to actually and enough confidence to even like to believe in myself enough to approach other game developers and selling it I have this idea and I want to found a studio do you

want to found it together with me but after I got the courage and I actually approached people I've never looked back I'm happiest but I have ever been my studio polka-dot studio we make meet core games for females for us meet core is the most interesting we want to make the games that are casual enough to really attract a broadest possible audience of females but after you start playing the game to offer enough depth and progression and interest to actually satisfy the maturing mobile gaming gamers and our first game is actually a pretty unique mix of social media simulation like Instagram and a dress-up that's actually all what I had thank you

very much thank you very much well let's if you don't mind and see if we can get some questions does anyone have any questions otherwise you get me asking them because I mean one thing I'm thinking is that don't think this is just an issue limited to targeting and kind of female audience which obviously you rightly say are the largest spenders and largest players and I think it's actually a general question of diversity in principle I think we're we have a massive difficulty finding their momentum to get enough audience in grab classical for one of a better phrase games we're male dominating you didn't you you could argue it strikes me that there's actually you know a whole bunch of areas where understanding a niche could be much more effective yes definitely like most seriously mobile games is the most competitive industry where is and everybody is competing in the same pool it's a big pool but still and Vess totally another

pool that you could be competing we're not so much competition and we're the potential for winning is much greater so you really need to kind of figure out where do you want to compete Annika big Nicias but I think the fact that you like you said we are in a situation where it's very easy for people from particular background to have already been established but how do we carry we reach wider how do we get more people involved who maybe don't think of the games industry as welcoming as it could be do you have any thoughts on that yeah well we in Finland we are trying to kind of be firstly of course we need to kind of have more girls interested it's like have confidence enough but I could be making games because I think the problem is with most famous they don't like the women we don't consider ourselves gamers those who are gamers who actually play PC and consoles and everything they

probably already are in the gaming industry but you really need to attract the other girls who don't consider themselves gamers who maybe just play on mobile and not kind of figure out that that's something inferior and give them confidence to actually go to schools give them examples but there are female teams they are female studios they are female developers even coders whatever and when like want together to kind of women help each other and that's what we are doing here in helsing give it 4 monthly lunches and everything yeah and I think that combined with a lot of the influence of stuff when you see kind of some amazing kind of what women youtubers are talking about the games that they love with a passion I think that's having a knock-on effect in terms of yeah people's willingness to get involved but I do think there's a disconnect between the influencers generally and the developers and I think a lot of audiences don't care about developer community you know we don't care about us at all you know I go to an

event called insomnia quite regularly and it's an amazing show full of like you know tens of thousands of people lots of kids and they're not interested in what people making the games there are only interesting the people talking about them that's a risk yeah yeah it's just used to be making game making games more approachable we are working definitely on it I think that's in a couple of weeks UK will be replaced with a 18 year old girl as a CEO super self that's cool in every company and just give them freedom to do it exactly and I know thank you very much thank you so [Music] [Music]