Kirk Hamilton

multiple prominent games in 2025 hades 2 ghost of yotei and silk song were the second installment in a successful franchise and featured a female protagonist in the case of hades and ghost of tsushima the protagonist of the original installment was male and while i haven't played hollow knight my understanding is that the protagonist is possibly genderless or at the very least not explicitly female that's right

Similarly, the upcoming Witcher 4 falls into this category, with Geralt in the original trilogy and Ciri in this later installment.

Do you think this is a conscious strategy by game developers?

Is the logic here that it's too risky to launch a franchise with a female protagonist, but once your player base has bought in, they'll accept a female protagonist in the second installment?

Is there an idea that players who liked the first game will buy the second one regardless, but by adding a female protagonist to the second game, they might draw new female players or femme-presenting gamers of any gender who didn't play the first?

Or is this just a low-effort cosmetic way to distinguish the sequel protagonist from the original protagonist?

Or do you think this trend is just a coincidence?

Definitely not a coincidence.

He is because there was actually a Kickstarter stretch goal that they took a very long time to implement where they were like, we're going to make a female character, which I know because I waited a really long time for that.

Yeah, I think that's definitely a thing.

I also think totally non-cynically that times did change and that game developers who maybe would have wanted to make a game with a female character previously just didn't, either they didn't have the resources or confidence or whatever the situation was.

backing by their publisher to do it and felt like the safer option was to have a male character have seen many games succeed with a female protagonist and are like, I actually wanted to do this the first time around and now I can.

And like, I guess that's sort of cynical, but I don't necessarily think it is.

I think it's normal for times to change.

And in this case, it's a good thing.

So I'm excited about it.

And I think it's a nice trend that this is the case.

And that now, I mean, when I was first covering games,

it was like almost never that there were playable female characters in games.

It would be so notable that that would be a huge talking point about the entire marketing of the game, like the amount of time people spent talking about that Tomb Raider reboot trailer, like just the trailer and how was Laura presented in it and was it fair to her and on and on and on.