The statistics are worthless.

Game sales are driven by far more than the protagonist's gender.

For example, first person shooters are incredibly popular and sell well. They also feature mostly male protagonists, which skew the numbers. If you played a girl instead of Master Chief or the Rookie in the Halo games, would they sell any less? No. Heck, you could gender swap the main character and not tell anyone, and no one would know the difference. Did Metroid Prime sell any less because Samus was a girl? Hell, no. The gender doesn't matter, it's far more about the mechanics and the gameplay style, and a male protagonist is used simply out of habit and the fact that companies don't like to experiment.

Do the statistics take that into account? Nope.

And that's only one of dozens of factors that make these statistics worthless.


Games can, and do, sell well with female leads. We've seen tons of examples in recent years alone (which you have all already cited, so I won't bother to go over again). We will see more in the future.

Hopefully somone will get word out to these guys to forget the industry and start crowdfunding it.