For Sony Worldwide Studios' president Shuhei Yoshida, the most nerve-wracking announcement of their E3 press conference wasn't The Last Guardian, Shenmue 3, or Final Fantasy 7 Remake, it was Killzone developer Guerrilla Games' new IP, Horizon Zero Dawn.
The game marks a significant investment for Sony and is an entirely new entity but there was a third reason why Sony was concerned about the game: its protagonist is a woman.
Speaking to Polygon, Yoshida said "Personally, The Last Guardian was very emotionally important, a great reveal, but for me the announcement of Horizon from Guerrilla Games is actually the biggest project for me for this E3 to announce because it's a big project and a new IP.
"I was nervous to see the reaction from people. She's a female lead character," he said. "That has always been the vision by the team, but we had a discussion. Is it risky to do a female character?"
After development began, there was so much discussion internally that Sony brought in its marketing deparment to start focus testing.
"The concern came after the game was in development," Yoshida commented. "We started to show it to many more people internally and they had questions about it. So we worked with our marketing groups to do this focus testing.
"We wanted to see how people would react to some of the things: open world RPG, the set up of machine versus primitive weapons and the female protagonist. All of those things."
Despite positive feedback from the tests, Yoshida was still nervous given the limited number of people involved. However, he believes concerns that women protagonist don't sell are no longer valid.
"Looking at our press conference and other's press conferences, many teams our doing it now," he said. "Like there is a new lead in Assassin's Creed, and Mirror's Edge is back. I feel great that there is more diversity in the kind of worlds and kind of characters that we are making as an industry."
Yoshida hopes more games feature women protagonists in order to increase the appeal of gaming.
"As an industry, I think we should continue to make efforts to have more females in studios on the development side and to get different perspectives," he said. "Games have become more and more popular in terms of who plays, especially in terms of mobile. We have a chance to further increase the reach, from a PlayStation standpoint, to a bigger more diverse audience.
"In order for us to do that, the games we create have to appeal to a broader audience."
Horizon Zero Dawn does not currently have a release date but you can find out more about the game here.
