The Gazette (Montreal)
August 25, 2007 Saturday
Final Edition
High School Musical 2 scored in TV ratings. Now will it score with girl gamers?

BYLINE: Reuters

SECTION: WEEKEND: TAKE 5; Pg. I2

LENGTH: 512 words

DATELINE: LOS ANGELES

Can High School Musical and Hannah Montana finally take girl gaming to the next level?

Many teen and tween girls - and others totalling a record-breaking 1 million Family Channel viewers in Canada and 17.24 million Disney Channel viewers in the U.S. - were fixated last weekend on the premiere of High School Musical 2. Based on that overwhelming response, Disney Interactive is hoping that interest will then shift to gaming aisles of retailers nationwide.

Beginning with High School Musical: Making the Cut for the Nintendo DS, Disney Interactive is bringing out four titles based on the two licensing juggernauts in the coming months.

"The demand for both the High School Musical and Hannah Montana games has been enormous among retailers," Disney Interactive GM Graham Hopper said. "I think the industry is starting to wake up to the fact that girls play games."

Getting that female audience into video games, especially consoles, has long been a holy grail for publishers, and there have been encouraging signs.

According to the Electronic Software Association, 38 per cent of game players are women or girls, and a Harris Interactive poll this year found that tween girls spend up to 10 hours a week playing games, compared with 16 hours a week for tween boys.

"The industry is still dominated by the male side, but we're definitely seeing not just more female players but older gamers as well," said Beth Llewelyn, senior director of corporate communications at Nintendo of America.

"We've had success with DS titles like Nintendogs but also with the Brain games - Brain Age and Big Brain Academy - that are definitely skewing more toward females."

The problem has been that girls and women tend to be casual players, interested in easy-to-pick-up social games but not consistently shelling out $30 to $50 for more complex fare.

"The real key is to get girls to begin obsessing over games the way they might obsess over a boy band or shows like High School Musical," said Jessica Chiang, marketing producer at Her Interactive, which has carved out a niche making PC games based on the Nancy Drew licence.

Chiang said the way to achieve that passion seems to be the right licence, noting, "If they already like the TV show or dolls, they tend to want to get the game."

Hopper added: "We already know that girls will play on the Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advance hand-helds," he said, touting the previous success of Disney Interactive titles for hand-helds based on Lizzie McGuire and That's So Raven.

"But there have not been a lot of examples of huge successes on the home consoles, though we've got the two properties this season to see if that's about to change."

It also is going to take the right platform, and Nintendo might have more of those answers right now.

"They're justifiably quite proud of the way they're growing the market, and they have lot of information to back up the fact that they're really starting to get the female gaming audience," said Sarah Handley, senior global brand manager at THQ, which this year is bringing out a game based on Bratz: The Movie.