Rohan from Blessing of Kings has an interesting theory on the use of sexism as a marketing plot. No, not "sex sells". But he suggests that "A signal that the company is slightly female-unfriendly is also a signal that the game will emphasize difficulty and more hardcore elements like PvP.". While I had to chuckle about the implicit insult that all hardcore players are chauvinist pigs, I do think Rohan is onto something here: If a company was making a game that was "female-friendly", it would probably be less hardcore and less PvP-centric. I am pretty certain that World of Warcraft has a higher percentage of female players than Darkfall has.

I do reject the simplistic notion that a game would have to be easy and have pet-collecting to appeal to women. I do however think that women are better at judging games as an artistic whole entity, and would in most cases prefer a broader game (a "world" MMORPG) to a game where the goal is to do just one thing very well (a "game" MMORPG). Women being under-represented in first person shooter games has less to do with those games being "too hard" or "hardcore", but more to do with these games not being all that interesting and varied to start with. The reason why broader games have to be easy is because otherwise the women would outperform the men. :)

I think many of the failed attempts to create a WoW-Killer MMORPG were due to the developers only looking at the "game" parts, stuff like leveling, PvP, or raiding. To be attractive to a broader, and more female audience, the game needs to be broader too, offer more different activities. The makers of Rift clearly got that message when they introduced fishing. But lots of games still release with at best half-baked crafting systems and very little to do in the game which isn't directly related to progressing. And then Rohan's theory kicks in: If your game is too narrow to be attractive to women anyway, you might as well put a sexist image on the cover and at least get the hardcore players in.