First, I think you should ask yourself why you care so much in the first place what gender a character is and if you didn't think the reverse was a bad thing why you would think this was a bad thing.
I care in the sense that it's not appealing to me. Not female characters in general, because trust me, I've played a lot of games that feature them (and they're not all pre-reboot Lara Croft either) but this onslaught of low charisma queerbait caricatures is actually quite off putting.
Like I said, I don't actually care in the case of Ghost Of Yotei, but the creators clearly do.
For decades we got the same character in video games. Generic white male with a history of military or police or something. All these characters were so similar to each other.
Maybe one decade - the PS3/360 gen when gaming started to really become mainstream. No, that isn't an implication that white men characters single handedly brought gaming forward (I thta credit goes to a shift in general subject matter/concept and fidelity), it's to say that people have slightly warped memory about the history behind gaming because of it.
The 90s were definitely not all about dudes in the military. The "generic" thing back then were anthropomorphic animal mascots. For the PS1 and PS2 gen, you probably had just as many East Asian men as white American or British, and that still carried over a lot of the mascots and diverse human characters.
What I definitely will say is that those "generic" characters are the same ones the industry is recycling and nostalgia baiting with as it's harder to get the recent wave of protags over.
I think you're also conflating a lot of things and ignoring things as well.
Ghost of Tsushima came out and people hated Jin Sakai and thought he was boring and dull.
I didn't think he was interesting, but "hate" is a very strong word, and Yellow Dye Samurai over here doesn't look or sound any more fascinating.
A lot of this is simply about differentiating products and gameplay. Notice that in the first Spider-Man game, it wasn't just MJ, it was also Miles pre-spider bite. These are used to break up the gameplay loop so that you don't get tired of them playing 20+ hour games.
Trust me, I don't need any convincing that including Miles in this was a mistake. Peter outside of the costume would've been just fine by himself.
You bring up Wolverine, but you don't realize how boring it would be to play as Wolverine for 15 hours of straight melee and by building in Jean Gray, not only do you break up the gameplay loop, but you have the character ready to go for X-Men, which we already know they're working on after Wolverine.
Boring to play as a guy who has super strength, speed and metal claws coming out of his fist? Give me a fucking break. Nobody ever got bored of "just" playing as Alex Mercer in Prototype or "just" playing as Spider-Man in Web of Shadows or "just" playing as Kratos for every GoW before Ragnarok. In fact, I notice positive reception is a lot softer as we try to "break up" gameplay with half baked side characters. If you've made playing as any character boring to the point of necessitating more to play, particularly with a double-life superhero as your main protagonist, you've done something terribly wrong.
Insomniac included Jean Grey (and are making a massive mistake with her for the long term prospects of the character) because they just HAVE to have a playable female in their games now. The studio is about as deep blue as it gets. There is no reason to pretend that wokery isn't one of their main priorities. They've said it, demonstrated it, and have even had it leaked that they train their employees to get on board if you need more confirmation.
They literally do the same thing in God of War Ragnarok but it has nothing to do with diversity (people also complain about Atreus), but as I said, people continue to miss the point, it's about breaking up gameplay loops.
Maybe stop doing it then.
With your criticism you're ignoring games like God of War Ragnarok, Sackboy, Astro bot, Spider-Man Miles, Morales, Spider-Man 2, Ghost of Tsushima, TLOUP1 Remake, Rise of the Ronin, and coming up Death Stranding 2, Saros, Wolverine, and Lost Soul Aside, not to mention probably Venom. The vast majority of Sony's games are still driven by male characters.
I'm not ignoring it, it just doesn't stack up for the present or forseeable future of PlayStation.
Sackboy is not only cross gen, but irrelevant. It wasn't even maybe by MM. Sissy-Man 2 was so woke that it can't count. TLOU is a remake. Ghost of Tsushima's Jin is now decommissioned. Rise of the Ronin and Lost Soul Aside are irrelevant third parties. Sony doesn't own Death Stranding or KojiPro either, they're just getting cucked. Venom is, by all accounts, cancelled.
It's also funny that no one complains about Stellar Blade.
Because it's irrelevant and not a Sony first party.
So many of you are choosing to die on this really silly hill. At the end of the day I've never cared whether a main character or side character was male or female. It literally doesn't matter. It's a video game. Some of my favorite characters are male and some of my favorite characters are female.
So what happens as the sales drop?
The only thing I will say is that I think Insomniac missed a great opportunity to build a much better female playable character in Black Cat, but I can also understand a bit why they didn't use her. The wanted to build stealth only sections and she has super strength. If she gets caught it's not really game over and then it makes it a stealth optional section. I think there are arguments either way there, but I think she would have been a better choice rather than shoehorning in MJ who is just a regular person.
They also made Black Cat gay. Current Insomniac would never let her be hot, straight and obsessed with Peter.
I'll also say that they didn't do enough to differentiate between Ratchet and Rivet and I get that they canonically the same person from different dimension, but they're still different dimensions meaning that they've had different experiences. They should have had some differences in their gameplay loop to make it more enjoyable to switch between them. This was another missed opportunity.
One concern I have is that Insomniac doesn't seem to take feedback well on their games. Instead they double down. Eventually it's going to come back to bite them.
Naughty Dog are gonna feel it the worst.
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