4 Nov, 2010
Think Heavy Rain undersold? Nope, neither did I, but Gears of War’s Cliff Bleszinski believes that Quantic Dream’s epic Interactive Drama piece undersold due the game not being appropriately marketed to women. In an interview on Irrational Games website, Epic Games’ design director ‘Cliffy B’ spoke of how Heavy Rain’s true crime themes would have made the perfect game for ‘girls who don’t usually play games’:
“I hate to sound misogynistic but it feels like such a great game for a girl who wouldn’t normally play games.”
“Because women love true crime! I don’t know what it is. I’ve said it before – they love two things in life: queso dip and true crime.
“Y’know, you’d see Heavy Rain advertised in PlayStation Magazine and things like that. I’m like, dude why isn’t this in Entertainment Weekly? Why aren’t you marketing this to the right crowd?
“There were scenes were I was almost literally dropping the controller it was paced so well. If you had that and shipped a disc with all those women’s magazines you’d maybe have sold twice as much.”
Despite Bleszinski’s comments, David Cage announced in August that to date Heavy Rain had sold 1.5 million units worldwide, and with the Move Edition of the game predicted to give the title second wind over Christmas, that figure could soon be set to rise. While I can totally see Bleszinski’s point, his comments seem rather ill phrased and come across somewhat condecending. So girls, put down the Patricia Cornwell for the night and run out for a copy of Heavy Rain!
Source: Eurogamer
Cliffy B has said on twitter that EuroGamer got it wrong.
Entertainment Weekly >< UGH.
My boyfriend's step-mom plays some crime games on her laptop. She isn't a typical gamer in ant sense of the word, but she does enjoy female detective games. idk why?
Hey, how about giving away copies of Imagine Fashion Designer inside copies of Attitude? Oh wait, no, that’s a sweeping generalisation too. My bad.
In Cliffy B’s defence I don’t think he quite meant to come across as quite such a chauvinistic pig but starting a sentence with the phrase ‘I hate to sound mysoginistic but..’ is never going to end well.