At our school, by the time you reached 2nd year most everyone disappeared, male and female. Fall semester sophomore year was about 25% of fall semester freshmen.

As it turns out, making video games has little to do with playing them.

Haha right. Almost everyone flushed out in CS1.

"I want to make games!" to "This shit is hard, I'm gonna get a business degree."

As it happens when you have projects that take about 4x (or more) the amount of time as your friends majors that takes a toll. People would rather be partying than writing code. Maybe our CS1 was a bit too hard (we've had many discussions with the profs about this and the attrition rate and what to do about it), but everyone who finished freshmen year graduated in our class. It prepared us well, but it was too hard for most.

Yeah I think that seems to be a pretty common scenario. It's pretty unfortunate that there are people who only think of programming in relation to game development rather than the rest of the spectrum.

However, if you both want to make games, and have the stuff to actually make it through a CS degree program, hearing this shit gets a little old.

Back in college, I had a roommate who was a recently-graduated electrical engineer (I, at the time, was a rising sophomore). We had a chat about dating in electrical engineering.

"Angersock," he said," do you know how many women there were in my first year?"

I thought for a second. "I don't know, maybe 20 or 30?".

"About half my class of around 80 or so. Do you know how many I graduated with?"

"Erm, 10 or 15?"

"Try 3. Does the phrase 'hunted to extinction' mean anything to you?"

Not the best metaphor, dude ...

This is the case at my uni. I'm currently a senior and my first intro java class was around 1/5th females. There are now 2-3 in any upper-level class.