I have lamented many times that as video games have become technically more and more advanced, women in videogames, primarily in Western ones, have gotten uglier and uglier.  In this article, I discuss in more detail why this is happening. In the current and last generation, i.e. PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4, things have gotten so bad that there were several games where the female main character was so off-putting that I refuse to buy the game. A hundred soy-addled game journos and hordes of people on forums could write that those games are perfect and I still would not care. Examples are Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4), Horizon: Forbidden West (PS5), Returnal (PS5), Control (PS4), and Forspoken (PS5). The woman in the Horizon games has a face like a dude, the chick in Control is fugly, menopausal and has a comically large chin, and the main protagonist in Returnal is a woman in her 50s with a wrinkly ass, which you get to look at for the duration of the game as it is in third-person.

One reason why women in videogames look worse and worse is of course the cultural zeitgeist in the West according to which everything has to be ugly. However, I think we should not underestimate the role of diversity hiring. Women are absolutely vicious towards each other in the workforce. It is not at all uncommon that they refuse to work with each other, or shoot snarky remarks at each other for the duration of a meeting. Men just do not do that. The problem is that women rank each other according to looks. Deep down they know that men do not care about their status, and that every high-status man in the building would much rather fuck the hot intern than the wall-hitter who runs the accounting department.

When women get into positions of power, they like to hire other women as they are deeply tribalist. However, they absolutely hate hiring women who are more attractive than them. In a company I am quite familiar with, “gender quotas” are being pushed relentlessly, with hiring managers needing to fulfill quotas. Some of the male hiring managers seem to think that if they have to hire a woman anyway, they may as well hire one who is pleasant to look at. In contrast, my perception is that female hiring managers first and foremost seem to want to hire women who are unattractive compared to themselves. In one case, the hiring manager is a woman in her 30s who has an at best average face, and the two recent hires she made are both relatively rotund, with pig-like facial features.

Based on what I have observed about female behavior in hiring and in their social interactions, I would not at all be surprised if women in the video game industry exhibit similar behaviors. Once you have a woman in your character modeling team, I bet you can see the female characters in the game get uglier and uglier. Probably there is also the issue of female aging. After all, as those female modelers get older, they become less attractive themselves, so they need to downwards adjust the attractiveness of the character models they work on.

If you think that my claims are ludicrous, then maybe look up the female cast of the Netflix series The Witcher, compare it to the videogame The Witcher III, and also look up what the women involved in the creation of this TV show look like. Sure, it may all be one big coincidence that Lauren Schmidt Hissrich is not overly attractive, but I think there is something seriously going wrong. On a completely unrelated note, Lauren Schmidt Hissrich is married to the Jew Michael Hissrich, so it is quite likely that Lauren is a Jew herself, not that this has anything to do with the push for diversity and ugly women in the Netflix adaptation of The Witcher.

Lastly, a few pictures tell more than a thousand words, so I would like to ask you what game might sell more. I start with Nier: Automata, a game in which the characters have been animated so well that some people have uploaded studies on YouTube, or created tasteful GIFs that surely nobody ever jerked off to:

Here is the face of the main protagonist in Returnal:

I have nothing against aging, unattractive women, but how about you keep them out of my video games? Vidya is supposed to provide an avenue for escapism instead of reminding you about what a hellscape the real world is. As a contrast to the granny in Returnal, feast your eyes on 2A from Nier: Automata:

Here is 2B from Nier: Automata:

As a gimmick, most of her face is covered, but you can certainly see that her facial shape is rather pleasing to the eye. By the way, Nier: Automata sold over six million copies, and when it broke the one-million barrier it was already hailed as an incredible success by the publisher. This game is actually a sequel to a mediocre PS3 game named Nier, which was a commercial disaster. It is one of the worst games I have ever played, to be quite frank. It is not even clear to me why it got a sequel. Presumably, the director had the utterly outlandish idea of putting super-hot chicks into the sequel, got the project green-lit, and ended up with the biggest success in his career. Absolutely nobody could have predicted this.

I sometimes wonder if Western publishers still care about sales. Judging by their actions, I am tempted to believe that profits are no longer seen as important, certainly not in comparison to politics. Still, eventually this problem will be solved. For one, it is pretty hard to ignore that Japanese and Chinese developers have a lot of success with releasing games with characters, male and female alike, that are pleasant to look at. On top, eventually money will come into play. In the end, companies will be driven out of the market, which happened to quite a few once big studios. Some studios are even struggling mightily, such as CD Project Red, who managed to throw away many years of goodwill, primarily due to the release of The Witcher II and III, with the janky Cyberpunk 2077. They still have not fixed this game. It has little longevity, and even though it sold well enough, it certainly did not live up to its expectations. BioWare is also a good example. After their critically acclaimed Mass Effect 2, they released a shoddy third part, and an even worse follow-up. The bottom line is that you can put as many unattractive characters in your games as you want, but they will not lead to extra sales, quite the contrary.

When a hyperventilating Western journo asked the director of Nier: Automata why 2B is so sexually objectified, he shrugged and said, “I like girls.” A similar attitude would do other studios good as well, and help them break out of their artistic death spiral where every female character is butt-ugly whereas male characters need to be as hot as possible. Until that happens, I expect Western game studios to have a hard time producing games with iconic female characters. Somehow, I have not come across a lot of fan art for Returnal, Control, or The Last of Us, but maybe I just do not find it in those mountains of 2B images.

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