Video Games Can't Afford to Ignore Women

In some ways, World of Warcraft is a diverse place, with humans, orcs, elves, and gnomes fraternizing on the game’s digital battlefields. But pretty much all of the fantasy world’s female characters have two things in common: skimpy clothing and absurd body proportions. That may change as the decade-old king of online role-playing games bleeds subscribers. Last month, Mike Morhaime, chief executive officer of Warcraft developer Blizzard Entertainment, e-mailed a blogger who had written that she could no longer play the company’s games because of their sexist overtones. “We are challenging ourselves to draw from more diverse voices within and outside of the company and create more diverse heroes and content,” Morhaime wrote in the message, which the blogger put up on her site. A Blizzard spokesman confirmed its authenticity but declined to make the CEO available for an interview.

For years, executives at PC and console game companies, including Blizzard, have dismissed complaints that women characters are treated less like people than power-ups. But they’re starting to show more interest in cultivating female players as their audience moves to cheap or free games on smartphones and tablets. World of Warcraft had 6.8 million subscribers as of June 30, a 29 percent decline from the start of last year, data compiled by Bloomberg Businessweek show. Research firm Gartner projects that by 2015 revenue from mobile games will surpass that of PC games, and researcher InMobi says women make up 61 percent of mobile gamers in the U.S. One mobile game, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, became developer Glu Mobile’s top-grossing product almost overnight.