Steam is great unless they are fucking you over, which happens a bit too often. Steam is a great system run by monsters made of pure evil.

And on the other topic, the basic question is, "What kind of game would appeal to females?" And it was also answered several times even if no one seemed to notice. The kind of game that appeals to them is kind labeled casual.

Old people get brain training games, men get FPS games, women get bejewled. Or are the examples that keep getting tossed out totaly off base?

The other option that was pointed was the number of prostitues you could sleep with in certain games.

Are you saying that if we increase the number of male prostitues in games, the game will be more apealling to females? That really says something about what you think is important that i am pretty sure you didn't want to say. 

To me, it seems that there are 3 primary reasons why games are not made to cater to women, and will never be made to cater to women.

First, the vast majority of women simply don't care about this issue. We can barley get 50% vote out for a presidential election in USA, you think people are gonna be up in arms about women not being catered to in the video game industry? I don't see any boycotts forming.

Second, you still have yet to tell us just what a game that caters to women involves. An itemized list would be nice. The majority has no problem making such a list for any game they want. EX> elemental is going to be a 4x TBS fasntasy game(and awesome too). BAM, exact details. You want something to actually happen? Produce details. Not just things that are NOT what you want or vauge suggestions, but things that are what you want in a detailed manner that can actually be used.

Third, The major companies don't care. Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, they care about the bottom line. And as long as reason 1 is true and widespread boycotts fail to materialize these major companies will continue to not care. PC gamers can't even get a console or dedicated servers out of infinity ward and those are exact requests.

My point is, your only evidence that there is a problem is that women tend to play more casual games then hardcore games and you have no solutions other then unworkable things like "cater to women" without telling us HOW to cater.

tl;dr - No proof of gender bias given and no solution given, thus no issue.

Steam's growth? Why? They forced publishers to use their service .

SEGA - Empire Total War

Activision -CoD MW2

THQ - Dawn of War II

SEGA - Aliens vs. Predator

and so on.

Yeah steam didn't force anyone (but valve) to use steam. Like I've said before I would prefer every game to use at least one of the platforms because its SOO much better than the alternative (i.e. having to create a new acount to play, gamespy and silly non standard crap).

Ah the disscusions on MMO forums about what kind of armour females should wear. So good. Of course the answer is always the same from me - "Anything they want". Why does everyone have to wear the same thing? As if covering up female characters with armour would save them from males gaze? lol I find that fully armoured females can be far more attractive. The point is in a fictional game the clothes set the tone of the chacter and enviroment. That should be the players choice. If there isn't a range from full to skimpy then the developer has failed.

(I like this new duel topic method, very efficent)

Well see some people are assuming ALL games need drastic changes to make them more appealing to more women (I say more because many of us women gamers have been playing these games for decades now as is, that doesn't mean we don't have gripes about some of it). Give us a choice. Next time Bioware talks about how they are all about story, remember they are also known for their romance ties... so put as much effort into the female romance choices as the male. If that means you need to add a couple of male characters into the mix, do it. If there is going to be an optional brothel in the story, suck it up and offer it to female characters too. You weren't squeamish about it for the guys so don't back off on the other end. I choice that example for a reason... it blatantly shows how sexuality for women, not of women, seems to be an issue for these, primarily male developers. FPS, female characters are just models, offer them. Four women playing left 4 dead may or may not want to a play a female character so offer it, it's not like there is a deep story they would have to change, we're talking about models and voices. And really, I have no issue with sexy characters that men and women play now, it would be nice to see more options. I think Aliens and marines, I think vasquez, not a zoey look alike or this other ponytailed girl you see so often in the FPS.

As for Steam. They're not forcing any publisher to use their service. If they are choosing to use Steam's servers, there is a reason for it. Maybe they are getting a discount on the cost of the servers or something like that. Steams competitors needs to offer more if they are tired of seeing Steam exclusives. Guess what, Ubisoft doesn't plan on using Steam... they're going to force people to use their not as good as steam but sort of like steam DRM service instead except they're not going to force this gamer. I won't put up with that. I want Settlers 7 but there is no way in hell I am going to buy it under the terms they are talking about. I'd prefer it on Steam. But my real preference is to have a choice, and I would choose Impulse over Steam if the price was the same.

TBH, when i have enough control i make one character look like rider from fate/stay night and my second character look like zero suit samus. But yes, long hair always has whacky clipping issues and movement issues. But its a small price to pay to be in control of samus.

I couldn't help but notice when I bought GC2 in Dec 2009, Impulse was not self-updating. I had to go out and find the latest version manually. That's not a problem for many people, but for many others its too much trouble. Since the business model for Stardock includes lowering barriers to entry, they need to look at making impulse self-updating.

Why didn't mine work? It said, "please update Impulse" out of the box, with no built-in mechanism to do that.