The Capcom Super Election results just came back, and they’ve revealed a lot about the company’s fanbase. You may have heard that Dante from the Devil May Cry games was crowned Capcom’s fan-favorite or that Dino Crisis has fans begging for more, but there’s another tidbit of information that can be found by looking at the demographics of the voters. It turns out that out of the over 250,000 votes that went into the survey, over 80% of those votes were turned in by males. This raises some questions on our part: Why does Capcom have such a male-dominated audience, and where are the girls if they aren’t here?
Aside from the usual questions, the Capcom Super Election Survey also asked voters for their age, country, and gender, which led to some surprising results – at least from our perspective. The gender breakdown of Capcom’s audience shows that of the 254,158 votes counted, 208,650 of those were male, making up 82% of the vote. Only 14% of voters were female, with 4% being counted as other. That’s not a small difference between male and female gamers, so what about Capcom and their games that make the audience such a boys-only club?
The answer might lie in the kind of games they’re making and what kind of characters are at the helm of those games. When you think of Capcom, you might think of the Resident Evil games, the Devil May Cry games, or maybe even the Ace Attorney games. All three of those series made the world’s “top 10” list, according to the survey, and they’re all led by men. At the end of the day, it’s pretty obvious that a lot of Capcom’s games are aimed at male action hero fantasies when you get to slay demons and shoot zombies to rescue the President’s daughter. A lot of these themes are leftovers from when the franchises first kicked off in the 90s, but they’re still there today.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with girls and women playing games led by male characters. Capcom’s audience, skewed as the percentages may be, are all playing the same games. But for female audiences, there’s also a specific draw towards female-led franchises by other developers, like Tomb Raider, Metroid, and even Bayonetta – games that are noticeably absent from Capcom’s lineup. So the answer to why Capcom’s audience is so male-dominated, at least in the Super Election survey, is simple: Their games were designed like that from the start.
