Remember Me dev says publishers balked at female lead character

Remember Me has a female protagonist, and that was a problem for some of the game's potential publishers, said developer Dontnod Entertainment to the Penny Arcade Report.

Creative director Jean-Maxime Moris told the Penny Arcade Report that Dontnod didn't decide to make Remember Me's hero, Nilin, a woman so much as the protagonist just "felt right" as a female character.

"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," said Moris, explaining that Remember Me and its world were built from the beginning to support a female protagonist.

When Dontnod started showing Remember Me to publishers, some of them refused to publish the title simply because people would playing as a woman in it, and because that 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,'" said Moris.

"If you think like that, there's no way the medium's going to mature"

Moris has a higher estimation of players' sensibilities, and higher hopes for the medium of video games. He and Dontnod told those companies, "If you think like that, there's no way the medium's going to mature." The Last of Us developer Naughty Dog also refused to back down when asked to push the game's female lead, Ellie, to the back of the cover.

Remember Me, which is being published by Capcom, is set for release on June 4 on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Windows PC.