The article comes in the last few months before “Remember Me“‘s release, a dystopian cyberpunk action game with a mixed-race female lead.

“We had some [companies] that said, ‘Well, we don’t want to publish it because that’s not going to succeed. You can’t have a female character in games. It has to be a male character, simple as that,’” creative director Jean-Maxime Moris told Penny Arcade.

Surprising no one, unfortunately. The article goes on to talk a little more about the extreme imbalance regarding leads and gender in the industry:

Looking back at an earlier PA Report, data from video game research and consulting firm EEDAR showed that, from a sample of 669 current-gen games which had protagonists of a specific gender, only 24 of these were exclusively fronted by women.

Less than half had the option of a female lead, including games where you created your own character.

Seems pretty standard - again, unfortunately, this is what we’re used to.

Male-only hero games sold 25 per cent better than those with an optional female hero, and 75 per cent better than whose with a female-only hero.

But this doesn’t tell the whole story. These figures reflect the fact that games with female-only heroes get less than half the marketing budget of titles with male-only heroes.

“Games with a female-only protagonist got half the spending of female optional, and only 40 per cent of the marketing budget of male-led games. Less than that, actually,” Zatkin concluded.

That’s the truth, then - that the people choosing what game receives what marketing budget are helping continue a self-fulfilling prophecy. The majority of publishers continue down the safe route of funding male-only led games, comfortable in the knowledge that, because of this, male-only led games sell by the bucket load.

Remember Me, produced by Dontnod Entertainment and published by Capcom, launches for PC, 360 and PS3 on June 4 in the US, and June 7 in the UK. Check out the HD trailer here!