Quote Originally Posted by Skyblade View Post
For example, first person shooters are incredibly popular and sell well. They also feature mostly male protagonists, which skew the numbers. If you played a girl instead of Master Chief or the Rookie in the Halo games, would they sell any less? No. Heck, you could gender swap the main character and not tell anyone, and no one would know the difference. Did Metroid Prime sell any less because Samus was a girl? Hell, no. The gender doesn't matter, it's far more about the mechanics and the gameplay style, and a male protagonist is used simply out of habit and the fact that companies don't like to experiment.
You're ignoring the point, which is: Why do they all have male protagonists? In the vast majority of games, a male protagonist is default. It's expected. It's "normal." I think you're being naive if you think a Halo game with a female Master Chief would have sold as well to a mass audience as the games did with the gravelly voiced male lead.

Similarly, a lot of other examples don't do much to disprove the fact that female leads are pretty marginalized. The Metroid Prime games each only sold a bit more than a million copies. Maybe something like two million lifetime, far lower than the ~10 million Call of Duty sells annually (obviously it's one of the most popular franchises on the planet, but the point is Metroid is very small in comparison). Heavenly Sword was pretty much a flop. Mirror's Edge is well-loved, but only sold about two million. That is pretty decent. Bayonetta wouldn't have a sequel if Nintendo didn't step in to publish the second game as an exclusive for the Wii U.

Sexism can play a role without being overtly malicious. Sometimes it is malicious, as TSoL pointed out about Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes vs. Women series. But other times it's there, affecting the decisions people make and the way things are presented, and it's easy to overlook because it just seems normal.