Apex Legends shoots down the competition to be named the most diverse video game
Apex Legends. (Respawn)
Apex Legends is the most diverse game, according to a new study.
The study, by gaming company Diamond Lobby, analysed the diversity of video game characters across gender and race.
The top finding is that almost 80 per cent of preset characters in games are male, while 54 per cent of main characters are white.
The study looked at over 100 games from 2017 – 2021, beginning with the 10 highest selling titles from each year and then adding in major releases from the biggest publishers.
Games with fully customisable characters were then removed (such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons) to focus purely on preset main characters.
Only 8.3 per cent of games have a non-white female main character.
Apex Legends, the free-to-play hero shooter, was found to be the most diverse game.
Half of the game’s characters are female, with seven male and one non-binary character.
In addition, half of the character’s are non-white, while six characters are LGBT+.
Since the study more characters have been added (namely Valkyrie and Seer) who further increase representation.
The study claims Apex Legends is setting the bar for diversity and, with its representative proportions, will be hard to beat.
While 63.3 per cent of games have both male and female playable characters, 31.7 per cent had only male while just 5 per cent had only female. That means there are over six times more games with only male characters compared to those with only female characters.
Ethnicity is harder to determine, owing to a lack of background information for many characters. As such, the study divided characters between white and non-white.
Still, the study found that 61.2 per cent of all characters were white, compared to 38.8 per cent for all other ethnicities combined. Just 5.3 per cent of games do not have a white character at all.
This new study follows a similar study into gaming diversity, that found male characters outnumbered female characters by four-to-one.
What’s more, they display tropes of toxic masculinity which are then often perpetuated by Twitch streamers.
You can read the Diamond Lobby study in full here.
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