The Last of Us Focus Group Originally All-Male

Gender issues are a big deal right now.  In the gaming industry, specifically, the sexism in video games and the gender inequalities in the companies making them have been getting a lot of attention.  Female gamers are making their presence known while female developers are insisting they be heard.  So what was the firm behind The Last of Us‘ focus-group testing thinking when they initially only intended to speak to male gamers?

This was not a statistical anomaly, an accident of randomly-drawn names.  It was a conscious choice, a decision made to simply not talk to any female gamers when trying to determine how the game should be promoted and how people reacted to it.  When Naughty Dog found out, they quickly rectified the situation.

As Naughty Dog creative director Neil Druckman put it,

My big surprise during this process is that the research group wasn’t planning on focus-testing female gamers — it’s something we had to specifically request. I hope this is a relic of the past that will soon go away.

One would expect a company whose entire job is to seek out the target audience would know better than to exclude part of it, but thankfully Naughty Dog caught on before it caused a real problem in this instance.  The Last of Us looks good enough for it to have been a terrible shame if it had ended up with that sort of mark in its development.