#are important

*another birthday brunch and a beautiful morning with friends in the books 💕

Gamers are, by most recent statistics, about 50/50 between men/women with other identities such as agender and non-binary people making up a small portion of that demographic (hard to say if it's because of generally lower rep, the representation in statistics, bad questioning, etc.)

Okay so anyway there's this thing going around BG3 that the most played origin is Gale and the most romanced character in Shadowheart ergo Gale romancing Shadowheart should make up the majority of the idk... Shipping? Rather than Astarion. And that this is not the case because of the "silent male majority" of gamers.

What male majority???

Even if you look back to the stats of US gamers from like 2008, women make up 40%??? Sure, this may vary from genre to genre, but DnD and RPGs are not a genre that women have been like, historically excluded from, unlike things like shooters where males are the majority (which is a whole other can of worms).

Also as a stats nerd it annoys me because Larian has given NO other information aside from what we've already seen, so you can't even make the assumption to begin with.

All we know is that 1.3 million players have COMPLETED the game, and around 500k players have CREATED a Gale origin (like, they could have just played the tutorial as Gale for all we know). Two very different things.

Removing the fact that players probably create multiple characters, this implies - extrapolating from the fact that 94% of players have created custom characters, and ~2 million players have created one of the origins - that there around about 30 MILLION PLAYERS!! Y'all cannot be surprised that Gale is "the most chosen origin" when origins have been chosen about 6% of the time!! And that only a fraction of those players would have chosen to romance Shadowheart! Like it's such a small fraction of players !!

For example, if even half of players that chose a Gale origin chose to romance Shadowheart, that's about 250,000 players out of 30,000,000 aka 0.83% - which is NOT a lot.

And y'all cannot tell me a good chunk of those Gale players did not want to live out their Bloodweave dreams while still having the full Astarion experience on the other end!!

Additionally, there is no data on the difference between chosen romances - for example, the actual difference in romance percentages between Shadowheart to all the way down to the lowest origin romance may be as low as 1% or less (just making this off the top of my head but I have worked in the games industry and with game data so this is totally plausible).

Like, the difference between a Karlach and Shadowheart romance or even a Shadowheart and Astarion romance may be way lower than you think, even though Astarion is not in the top 3 romanced companions. We have NO stats on the actual variable differences between these romances.

SO all that to say that this assumption removes a lot of variable data such as:

Most people probably playing as Tav. Just because Gale is the most played origin does not mean that there's a lot of people who did that in comparison to playing as Tav...

...and then assuming a correlation exists (ie. Gale origin = Shadowheart romance, or Shadowheart romance in mind means player will play as Gale) where one was never given in the first place.

Assumptions about gender identity of people who play as Gale.

Assumption of gender identity of people who romance Shadowheart. Like we all know the lesbians love Shadowheart and I cannot blame them.

Assumption of who primarily plays games like BG3 - something that absolutely cannot be assumed from pure player behavioral data. There's a reason that, generally, when doing user research studies, we pulled players based on their behaviors and not their demographics - it is more likely to give us actionable results that way.

A plethora of SO SO MANY OTHER THINGS.

And finally this annoys me because I love Galeheart and if ONLY it was as popular as y'all imagine it to be lmao.

This is kind of what annoys me about releasing data into the wild without raw numbers or specific definitions behind words being used.

People will make their own inferences without totally understanding the raw data as it is, or what was done to make us see the numbers we see, which is especially difficult in videogames when working with telemetry and hooks. These hooks have to be really specifically defined. If they're not, the data can be severely skewed. It also means you're working with very context-specific data (hence why they specify the "third act" romances in the OG data they shared, among other things).

best thing you could have ever said to me. like my dad always says. the only way to treat a cold is with contempt. I present: the only way to treat Sad Boi hours is with disdain