Activision doesn’t believe female leads can sell games, and has even gone so far as to change characters to avoid a lady protagonist, according to former employees. Gamasutra reports that focus testing has led to a serious lack of females in games, and since 2005 only girl-focused licensed games like Dora or Barbie have featured female leads at all.
According to the report, a 2007 game from Treyarch was tentatively titled Black Lotus. It featured an Asian female assassin lead character based on Lucy Liu, and the development team was excited about the project. But seeing testosterone-heavy hits like Halo 3 and Modern Warfare, Activision decided that players don’t want a lady at the helm. One former employee claims Activision “said they don’t do female characters because they don’t sell.” Another, more bluntly, says they were “given specific direction to lose the chick.” Black Lotus lives on now as True Crime: Hong Kong, having changed developers and, apparently, lead characters.
The former employees say this is endemic of a larger problem at Activision: the culture of development built on focus testing. Sources claim the publisher takes the feedback it gets to extremes, stifling innovation and sometimes even sacrificing quality by making time-intensive demands to change projects quickly. As a result, the focus test groups tend to want more of what they’ve already seen and enjoyed, rather than innovation, and the publisher is said to follow their lead.
