Female leads don’t sell games. This is the latest, according to a report on Gamasutra which claims that Activision actively discourages developers from using female protagonists. It’s either an indictment of the statement of the games industry and its inability to see beyond the perceived demands of a white, male market, or it’s a shrewd business move in a tough climate.

In a sad way, Activision’s alleged rejection of the female lead is just another case of games looking at the movie industry for inspiration. It’s all been done and said before. Back in 2007, Warner Bros boss was quoted as saying, "We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead." This was an apparent reaction to the lack lustre box office success of movies featuring Nicole Kidman and Jodie Foster in the lead and there were rumours of scripts with female protagonists going through the shredder before the ink had even dried.

Women as box office or unit sales poison, is an old story, but it appears to be an ongoing saga. According to the Gamasutra article, the only games Activision has made in the last five years, featuring female leads have been pink and cutesy titles such as Barbie and Dora. Unnamed sources and former employers reveals that the original premise for the upcoming True Crime 3, was a game called Black Lotus, which featured a Lucy Liu-style female assassin as the lead, but the development team were pressured to "lose the chick."

Black Lotus was meant to be a Hong Kong action film-inspired game with a kick-ass female protagonist. But due to Activision’s apparent reliance on focus groups and market research, it has become a GTA clone set in Hong Kong with a male lead.

One source said, "If Activision does not see a female lead in the top five games that year, they will not have a female lead." Games like Wet and Bayonetta are cited as proof positive that female cover girls just don’t cut the mustard when it comes to shifting units. One has to wonder why every other game flop (you know the ones with male leads) isn’t held up as an example of games where maybe boobs would have made the difference. No, for those games it was a deficiency in gameplay, whilst for the games with "chicks" it was a deficiency in the protagonist.

Of course, Activision denies the claims that it stifles creativity in this way, saying in a statement, "The company does not have a policy of telling its studios what game content they can develop, nor has the company told any of its studios that they cannot develop games with female lead characters."

In one way, if games with girls don’t sell, then Activision is just protecting its bottom line. After all, games are an expensive business, so why take unnecessary risks? The consumer is largely male, so it stands to reason that they will want to play a male protagonist. The dominance of first-person shooters with their focus on big guns, action and violence lends itself towards the male lead – it’s a perfect fit. It all makes sense.

Apart from the fact that developer creativity is behest to the publisher’s reliance on market trends, it’s the dubious claim that female leads equal poor sales. And no, we’re not going to make it through this column without mentioning Tomb Raider and Lara Croft. Despite her huge assets and obvious appeal to the male market, Lara was a huge draw for female gamers and sold bucket loads of games.

More recently, Mirror’s Edge featured the edgy cyber-goth chick, Faith. Although sales weren’t great, this was put down to flaws in the game design, lack of depth and value in terms of length, not due to the female lead. A better example would be Joanna Dark of Perfect Dark fame and Jade from Beyond Good and Evil. These are both strong, female characters that don’t rely on their sexuality to carry the story.

Most people would turn to Metroid and Samus, as a good example of a female lead, but I would beg to differ. Samus hardly flies the flag of womanhood, as she’s well hidden inside a suit of armour. There is nothing to suggest she’s a woman and the player could easily pretend otherwise.

The problem with many female protagonists is that they are usually female in form only. They act and respond in exactly the same way as a male lead would, making their presence either only for their obvious aesthetic advantages or completely null and void. In this vein, Master Chief could easily have been a woman and would still have blown our FPS minds.

Surely, we’ve all had our fill of the white, male action hero – in films and games – and that means we have to create more than just the white, female action hero. The road to better games can’t rely on better graphics with the same old characters forever.

What we need are publishers who are willing to support game designers and developers as the strive to bring us new, interesting characters in new situations and fighting for new causes. The women need to act like women, not just have the curves in the right places and the same goes for the blind orphan child and the black priest or the Chinese freedom fighter.

Tell us some new stories and don’t fall back on lazy preconceptions of what we want.