I will be researching the gender demographic for our project and to start, I need to list the game traits and genre.

Genre:

• Action

• Shooter

• FPS

• Multiplayer

starting off with Women, according to the research (Videogames Europe, 2020) the percentage of gamers in 2020 that are female was recorded as 45%, going further into details 86% played single player modes, 16% played offline local multiplayer modes and 23% played online multiplayer modes. as this is an online game this means from this research only 23% of female gamers would be interested or play this game.

I have made a chart to help understand what makes up the general demographic of gamers.

To also support this statistic I searched on Reddit where a user on Reddit _Cloud98 (2021) "Genuinely curious how many other female players are out there so what is your gender?" This post also came with a poll that had 7.7k responses with the results being 6.8k male, 458 Female and 380 other. 

Another website I looked at had a table of the more favourite genres on console, PC and mobile, with both male and female.

Match Making multiplayer

To learn about online multiplayer I looked at developer blogs from big AAA titles such as Call of Duty, Halo and Don't Starve together

Call Of Duty gave me a lot of good points to consider when connecting a player to a server for matchmaking by the game itself.

• Connection - Where is the client connecting to?

• Time to match - what is the current average time to start a match?

• Skill/Performance - What Skill level does the player have and are there other servers that are of a similar level as the player?

• Platform - Different platform in the game will have their advantages and own disadvantages is it better to have cross-play or keep the platform field the same?

• Voice Chat - Will this improve the overall gameplay experience and encourage teamwork work or will this become an issue caused by toxic behaviour?

• Input Device - is it fair to others to have alternative input sources that have their advantages to improve a player's performance?

• Recent Maps/Modes 

• Playlist Diversity - letting the players choose maps and modes will improve replayability by allowing them to play their favourite maps and modes whenever they like however this could lead to some maps being unused, but is changing the player matches worth the possible risk of boring the player's experience?

Dedicated Servers

When looking into Don't Starve Together to see how they did their servers I took a look at their old dev blogs by JoeW when they started, this is good since Klei Entertainment is open about the status of the game.

How they planned to do the multiplayer was "pretty straightforward stuff." they would provide a standalone server that would allow the user to set up their dedicated server on whatever device they choose to host (this can be their own devices at home or a 3rd party hosting service.) or if the user wanted to play locally on their network they can do without a server.

My thoughts

Now that method is commonly used in games like CS-GO2 (formerly known as CS-GO), TF2, Unturned, Project Zomboid and Splitgate commonly found as community server lists to separate official game stats or ranks.