Larian Studios - Swen In Search of Women

On his blog, Swen Vincke mentioned he discovered that the statistics from Kickstarter and Facebook show that only a very small portion of their visitors are women, which doesn't compute with his own experience. That experience is derived from his home situation and the women he meets on gameshows, which made him feel that at least a quarter or a third of the players are female.

One of the blind assumptions I’ve always made about Divinity: Original Sin is that many women play it.  I never had any doubts about this because I saw my partner play D:OS for many hours. She’s quite picky about her games and likes RPGs, so I figured that if the game would be unappealing to her (or womanhood in general for that matter), she would’ve told me right away.

My feeling that many women play D:OS is further reinforced by the people I meet at trade-shows. For every two or three male fans, there’s always at least one woman. Based on that, my lazy mind concluded that at least 25% to 33% of our audience is female, if not more (given that trade-shows are not exactly gender balanced).

I never really questioned this number because it fit with the split I saw for events like PAX. According to this report for instance, 35% of PAX visitors is female, and I think of PAX players as players who would typically enjoy D:OS.

But then this morning, I saw a number that didn’t compute at all. According to the Google analytics page for our Kickstarter campaign, only 4,19% of the page’s visitors is female versus 95.81% male! WTF?