I’m going to assume you’re trolling, because you’d have to be daft to believe this. EVE will never achieve a high percentage female population as it is because the game itself isn’t appealing for the majority of women.
Are there women who enjoy EVE? Sure, but they’re the minority.
If you want more women in EVE then the game needs to fundamentally change. There’s a reason why certain games and media content have the demographics they have.
What can be done?
Puzzles. Women dominate the demographics for puzzle games.
Mobile options with fast gameplay loops (5-10 min play sessions.)
- like it or not, women are the primary caregivers for small children. Having a game where you can lose your ship if you get called away to deal with issues is not going to endear yourself to this demographic. A game mode that allows you to set it down and then return to it later at your convenience and doesn’t take large amounts of time to complete objectives though? That’s something that can be worked with, and has been proven to be popular with this demographic.
Non-spaceship gameplay. Spaceships are inanimate objects and generally lack the human aspect that women tend to find more appealing. This could be changed a bit, if CCP were to make use of the volumetric cloud tech they have to create 3d overlay skins… to effectively turn your ship into a kitten or other small fury animal, but I doubt CCP wants to do that.
- Other than that, game mode options ccp could focus on would be to incorporate sims style gameplay.
- Officers and crew for your ships, employees for pi facilities, residents for a simcity module for the game.
- Planet side and in station gameplay where you can see your character.
- More customization options for clothing.
- Clothing that actually matches (the default options are generally terrible and there aren’t a lot of quality premium replacement options.)
Fully voiced epic arc questlines that take advantage of every vomit inducing bachelorette / soap opera trope that exists.
- I’m kind of trolling with this one, because while I think it would be popular with women, I’m not entirely sure the women who are drawn to EVE would care much for it, and I’d prefer the money be spent on improving the existing mission system, and using ai voice overs to flesh out the rest of the pve content within the game.
Cooperative gameplay. Things like Homefronts are a good start, but we need easier ways to onboard people into this content.
- If a person could go to one of these sites as a solo, and then see other people doing the content, and join up with them to do more of it, that would transform Homefronts into a tool for cooperative social interaction. That doesn’t mean the current content would necessarily need to change, but there could be some bridgehead Homefronts, that could serve as gathering places for people to form teams to tackle more difficult content. Frigate Homefronts could serve as a similar onboarding platform.
- Easier social interaction. All the fw voice chat channels are in locked discord channels. If you want to get into a fleet with fw people, and be on coms with them, you first have to go through a vetting process. All those extra steps are useful for opsec, but they also put artificial barriers in place when all someone wants to do is join a casual fleet.
There’s more changes that could be made I’m sure, but don’t think you can just make some lazy changes and it will have a major impact in how many women will be interested in EVE. The game will need some fundamental changes at a core level if you find it important to change the demographics of the participants.
As for the “need” for more female leaders: I think in general if we find plotlines involving characters like Esri Hakuzusu or Rán Kavik, they should be plotlines that actually make sense for the lore of the setting, not out of some arbitrary need for representation. Pigeonholing characters or plot devices into places they don’t belong, is the fastest way to destroy a franchise.
Even Disney isn’t immune to this fundamental principal, and CCP isn’t anywhere near as big as Disney. So if CCP wants to try their hand at some ill-advised corporate activism, they’ll find they burn much faster than the other examples of poor business sense in recent years.
Also… keep an eye on Iris (the evermark AI girl.) I have a feeling she’ll be unleashing hell in a few years.
