According to developer Dontnod Entertainment, Remember Me’s female protagonist was a bit of an issue for them when trying to find a publisher.

“It’s one of those things that we never looked at from a pure, cold marketing perspective because that would have endangered the consistency of the whole game,” creative director Jean-Maxime Moris told the Penny Arcade Report.

In our November/December issue (#257), Moris told associate editor Josh Harmon that having Nilin, Remember Me’s protagonist, was a natural fit—that the story they created was built around her gender. “At the risk of sounding a tad clichéd, women are more sensitive than men, ” he said. “They pay more attention to other people’s emotions. The nature of the game is really about how technology transforms people—not in a physical way, but in an emotional way.”

According to Moris, when they started showing Remember Me to publishers, said publishers expressed concern over the marketability of a female protagonist. Some flat out refused to publish the title because its female protagonist could reduce the game’s sales potential.

“We had some [companies] that said, ‘Well, we don’t want to publish it because that’s not going to succeed. You can’t have a female character in games. It has to be a male character, simple as that,’” Moris told the Penny Arcade Report.

To those publishers, Moris and Dontnod said, “If you think like that, there’s no way the medium’s going to mature.”

A Capcom-published Remember Me hacks its way onto PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 June 4.

Source: Penny Arcade Report