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On December 15, Twitch streamer Asmongold released a video on his YouTube channel predicting that Intergalactic The Heretic Prophet will not do well because of its female lead. The content creator, among others online, criticized the developers for choosing a "bald girl who isn't conventionally attractive" as the protagonist, stating that it would not resonate with the game's target demographic.
This is not the first time that Asmongold has commented on Naughty Dog's upcoming title. A day after Intergalactic The Heretic Prophet was announced at The Game Awards, the Twitch streamer made a post X about how he thinks the industry is supposedly overestimating the market for "masculine, non conventionally attractive female leads in games." His comments were in response to the negative feedback the trailer received at The Game Awards.
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Now, Asmongold has made a longer video on YouTube titled "Ugly Female Leads In Video Games" to share his thoughts on the issue. At the 16:37 mark of the video, the streamer openly states that he thinks Intergalactic The Heretic Prophet will not do "very well":
"I think with Intergalactic, the game as I said you know, the graphics for the game look incredible. But I don't really think the game's going to do very well."
He went on to claim that the genre of bounty hunter in space is for a male audience and that a bald unattractive girl as the protagonist will not resonate with them:
"You make a space Bounty Hunter video game and you have a bald girl who isn't conventionally attractive. I don't think you're really going to get that male audience that those games are really intended for. I don't think you're going to get them, and so we're going to have to wait and see but that's my prediction"
"Why would you ever put an ugly character in a video game?": Asmongold says game studios have fallen prey to "media narrative" about what gamers want to see
While Asmongold used Intergalactic The Heretic Prophet as his example to criticize what he believes are non-conventionally attractive characters in games, his main video calls out the video game industry as a whole. After talking about the discourse surrounding the female-led games announced at The Game Awards, like The Witcher 4, he claimed that many games are adding unattractive characters:
"I want to talk about the growing issue with a lot of games that are adding characters that are unattractive, unappealing, and unlikable, and often times, it's all three."
The streamer went on to state that he thinks video game studios have fallen prey to a media narrative about what gamers want to see in the characters they play as:
"I think that a lot of Studios have fallen prey to this idea that players and people want to have uh realistic characters I don't actually think that this is true I think that this is a media narrative that's created by journalists."
Asmongold further claimed that adding a so-called "ugly" character to a game is unjustified because it does not affect the people who don't care about a protagonist's attractiveness but does have an impact on the people who do:
"Why would you ever put an ugly character in a video game? Well, I think that this serves no one. I don't think it serves anybody because for all the people that don't care whether the character looks good or not, well, then those people are going to play or not play the game anyway.
He justified his claim that many people care about the attractiveness of video game characters by pointing out that cosmetic microtransactions are successful:
"For the people that are going to play a game and do care about a character's appearance, they use that as a criterion of whether they like the character or not. By the way, a lot of people say that people don't do this. If people didn't do this, microtransaction, cosmetics would not be making billions of dollars."
Readers should note that Asmongold is not the only Twitch streamer to speak out against the choice of protagonist for Intergalactic The Heretic Prophet. xQc has weighed in on the subject, claiming it's not as fun to play as an "ugly girl."
