There are a thousand and one debatable reasons why Halo sold such an astronomical amount of copies. Master Chief's gender was an ancillary one at best. That's not being naive. In this conversation, I'd say he was fairly perceptive.

Judging a game on its ability to sell multiples of millions isn't a fair assessment. Very few games reach that threshold, and dismissing a long line of iconic gaming heroines because later entries sold only a million is pretty arbitrary.

No one's denying there's less absurdly successful games with female leads in them than with men, or that some publishers' reluctance to over-market them is related to it. But the developer overextended himself with the comments at issue, with ample evidence to the contrary.