Box art adorning the front of video game boxes is a form of advertising seen by most game customers prior to purchase and should therefore predict sales if indeed particular depictions of female and male characters influence sales. In order to assess the cultural influence of video games on players, it is important to weight differently those games seen by the majority of players (in the millions), rather than a random sample of all games, many of which are seen by only a few thousand people.
However, the relationship between portrayal of female characters and videogame sales has not previously been studied. Content analysis of video games has consistently shown that women are portrayed much less frequently than men and in subordinate roles, often in “hypersexualized” ways.
