As much as I like the Sororitas and would not at all mind to see them in the game, I do disagree with most of the arguments you have brought forth. For one thing, as you rightfully say, most of them are subjective impressions. From the fact that you often play with with female players, it does not necessarily follow that they actually form a considerable margin of the player base. Naturally, neither does it follow from my experience that female players constitute less than 1/10 of the total player base (MMORPGs often being an exception) that they do actually form less than 1/10, and so forth. Besides...I didn't read your edit. Eh, nevermind.

Sisters of Battle aren't Space Marines... they are the Church's private army. By definition women can't be Space Marines because they are created from the Geneseed of 18 or so original super-warriors who were all male.

In hindsight it would have probably been better to have a Imperium and The Cursed and the Damned Factions instead of SM/CSM so they could have added Sisters of Battle and Cultists and Demons (which can be female) alongside a couple of SM/CSM Chapters (exclusively male). Too late though.

Personally I will relish any tears that come (most likely almost exclusively from people who wouldn't play the game anyway). Everything is getting sanitized and it is nice that Warhammer is not. BRING ON THE RACISM AND GENDER DISPARITY!

I represent the "tall skinny white dude who would be decent looking if he shaved his creepy neckbeard off" demographic.

I'm sorry, but this is absolutely not true.

See, there were actually 21 Primarchs...

No harm done!
I'll give one last try to properly get my point across. I'll try to be concise (especially since I feel that I'm keep repeating myself & that people keep getting confused as to what I'm trying to say--it must be my massive walls of text ).

Once again, I never said that there's a huge female population of female gamers (as much as I stated/agreed that there's not a huge female Warhammer fanbase--tabletop or otherwise).

I also wrote that women are in the minority when it comes to "gaming" in general.

I also said that--if handled well--including Adepta Sororitas could bring new players (regardless of gender) by offering more female playable characters.
Reiterating; they might not be the numbers that Producers & Share-Holders would prefer (i.e. a huge increase in player population).

While I did bring up the women I know that are gamers; even I said that I probably couldn't get them all aboard (if any) and elaborated that even number of women I know wouldn't be enough to make a dent.
I was just using them as examples of how the lines can be blurred ("there are no absolutes" or what have you), and that there have to be more people like them.

I did say that including Sororitas would be awesome & appreciated by both males and females (e.g. they would be one of my preferences). However, you also wrote that you wouldn't mind them being included either.
Then, I assume, we would both agree that there's probably more deserving Factions out there--in a, "A larger percentage of fans would rather have ____ as a Faction!" kind of way.
This is why the (hopefully) upcoming 5th Faction will come to a vote.

Thus, I'm trying to find where you disagree with my statements/arguments (outside of misunderstanding).

I did state that the population of female gamers (in general) has grown significantly in the past 10 years. So I guess I should elaborate on that...?

Let's talk general statistics, and what I meant by "significant":
I wouldn't have any proper numbers to give, so I'll go by a general example.
If the ratio of 1/10,000,000 [Female/Male gamers] becomes 1/1,000,000 [F/M] in 10 years; that's still a significant increase.

In this example, the ratio has increased by a factor of 10 (note: even in this example, this is not even close 10% of the total gamer population). Regardless, there still would be 10 times the number of women playing now than there were a decade ago (once again, this is an not a researched statistic).

Now, if you're at a video game store (or in a gaming lobby or Forum), you'd hardly notice the difference. You'd have to go through a million customers/players to encounter that one female, but it's much more likely to encounter them when compared to the 1-in-10-million chance.

Once again, the female gaming playerbase may not be the 10% margin that neither of us would agree to (could me more, could be less), but--when a game is trying to reach an already over-saturated market--having more gender-options would universally appreciated.

Right now we're all admittedly fans of the franchise (we wouldn't be here if we didn't care and weren't fans).
However, in the future of this game's release, there may new gamers out there (gender being irrelevant) that don't know of the franchise yet.

Adding Sisters of Battle might not profoundly impact the percentage of female players in EC at all; but there would be plenty of the "uninitiated" (ones that don't know all the fluff) that would be happier with a wider range of gender representation than "only elves have girls".

Maybe these new players just don't resonate with the aliens and ubermenchen and would prefer a more relatable female option (i.e. human females).
It might sound unreasonable to some fans of 40k, but it's not so strange if taken out of context of "well, it's always been this way in 40k."
However, awesomely enough, Games Workshop created an entire faction of female soldiers--so it's not against the lore, nor "Gender-Neutralizing"--it's in the canon.

This by no means justifies manipulating the Intellectual Property to suit this aim. I'd be loosing my mind if they made female Space Marines and Orks (going into a rage akin to many of the images you have depicted ).

1. To my understanding/opinion; Gene-Seeds are organs, and there may actually be a higher change of rejection with certain organs if it comes from the other gender--SCIENCE!
2. Orcs are technically gender-neutral; they reproduce asexually.

I really hope this clarifies my statements.

If not; anyone can start up a Conversation with me outside of this thread (just be civil ).

I might still be lurking around, but I've exhaustively said my piece in this thread--I will write no more in this thread.
[*everyone breathes a sigh of relief*]

Anyways, CHEERS!

[P.S.: I'd like to point out how--even though Warcraft was originally a RTS; WoW garnered a lot of female players as an MMO.
I often ran into people asking me, "There were Warcraft games before WoW?!"
Me = *Facepalm*
Nevertheless, I feel it would be dismissive to not see the potential of more women getting into Warhammer (a franchise that's also predominantly RTS in the video game circles).]

I find it highly questionable that even one male player would play the game when they otherwise wouldn't if they could play as female, but I'll leave that alone because it is just me nitpicking. Anyway, the same argument could be used to add theme park quests, raids, PvE gear grind, instanced PvP, arenas, etc. and while many of us would ask for our money back they would probably have more players join then quit.

Taking a look at other franchises... I don't think there are any women turned off by Halo because you can only play as men (I only played the first, if they've added playable females just pretend I said CoD) and I don't think adding women would broaden its appeal. As far as I know the number of females playing competitive shooters is increasing and most if any do not have playable females.

The only female TT-player I have seen used chaos daemons.

There are still plenty of women who are introduced to the 40k-universe. It doesn't require female space marines, and every one of them will not go directly to like/hype/collect Sisters of Battle because of all-male SM.

UNLEASH!

Technically, that does not have to be an issue. They are organised along similar lines and use comparable equipment - it'd be ridiculously easy to just offer SoB as female reskins of Space Marine characters. The only real problem would be the difference between Assault Marines (melee weapon and pistol) and Seraphim (dual-wielding pistols), but since Seraphim can have a melee weapon and a pistol as well, I'd reckon this is a much less intrusive difference than certain other aspects of the game that have already been announced *coughdevastatorscough*.

Of course, this won't happen, but it would have been an option to bring this faction into the game.

If this holds true in spite of current societal advances, I suggest this would be the fault of the fanbase. I'm sure we have all at least heard of various horror stories along the lines of "so I brought my GF into the gaming store and then this happened".

I wish it were otherwise, but I feel this forum is actually a good representation of the playerbase's general attitude regarding this topic. Warp, some posts in this very thread are:

Personally, I think it's a bit sad that the franchise does not make full use of what officially already exists in it since its very first edition in 1987. Sad, but also interesting, in a social experiment kind of way.

Speak for yourself.

Personally, I've begun to actively avoid various games for the simple reason of either objectifying women or missing out on the option to play one, much like I've begun to show greater interest in those that feature female protagonists (or male non-White ones, such as with Sleeping Dogs). I used to not mind it, but over the years of gaming I've grown tired of this "established industry wisdom" that (1) keeps shoving the same old archetype down our collective throats and (2) neglects a significant portion of the human population out of habit.

Is this the only criteria I apply to games? Of course not. As you yourself have pointed out with your remark on competitive shooters, gamers are still largely in a "eat or starve" situation, and perhaps some games are simply purchased because the buyer does not wish to miss out on the product entirely even if they consider missing variety on player characters a significant drawback. If the game is (subjectively) good enough, it will be played anyways, much like, for example, we play various indie titles in spite of sub-par graphics simply because they offer other exciting features.

I posit that for most sensible gamers, variety in player characters is a feature like any other (quality of the narrative, gameplay depth, sound and visuals, background), similar to how Eternal Crusade will be considered a purchase by many not solely out of its own merits, but simply because it is a 40k game.
Gamers still have a "threshold" that just isn't reached when too many of their personal checkboxes remain unticked by a new title, which is when it'll simply end up not being purchased. Usually in favour of another title that manages to have a larger list of what they personally consider a feature.

For example, I'll definitely try Eternal Crusade simply because it's 40k, even though it misses out on all of my three favourite factions so far. Fortunately, Orks are F2P, so I can see if the game would be fun enough for my shooter-based interests, in spite of not appealing to my 40k-army-based interests.

tl;dr: I don't think there is any gamer who doesn't consider a game a purchase on the reason of it missing out on playable females alone, but for many it can be very much a big factor in the decision. The end result depends on how good or bad the game is in other areas.

Yeah - ironically, from personal experience most female 40k gamers actually have Eldar and Tyranid armies, whereas SoB players were mostly male.

Of course this will be different in each region, especially as 40k players do not represent a huge part of the local population. But I got the same impression from talking on online forums as well.