No you guys, let me explain.
Corporate people are completely out of touch with reality and only care about making money. They're so out of touch they have to hire people to tell them what people think, including focus groups.
We're living in what's been referred to as a "babysitter economy". Women control something like 85% of spending, and these companies desperately want that money. What they don't get is that these statistics are misleading, they're talking to the wrong people, and they're never going to appeal to the people demanding the change.
So in trying to appeal to women they contact one of two groups, teenage girls and feminists. This has been going on for decades. Remember Raiden in MGS2? That stemmed ENTIRELY from a focus group where a single Japanese teen girl wrote that he hated games with stupid old men. That's why Raiden's an emo-haired bishi who spends a section of the game nude and cupping his balls.
Then they listen to feminists who say everything is sexist, costumes must be made less skimpy, breasts must be made smaller, etc. Of course, this doesn't represent actual women, particularly not the kind who might actually want to play the game. The way to appeal to women is actually with more sex appeal, just don't make it slutty, make it elegant, design costumes women would want to wear, make the characters fun, splash in hints of romance, just enough to get their imaginations going.
Making the breasts smaller, the adding gay shit, it's all an attempt to get the girls who spent millions on Twilight, Hunger Games and Candy Crush to pour some of that money into their franchises. But assuming it would be so easy to lure them in is like if they decided to make their fighting games turn-based to try and appeal to the RPG and turn-based Strategy markets.
Two minutes looking at any cosplay community will tell you the feminists don't represent even a tiny minority of the female community that would actually consider playing their game. The fact that you can google just about any fictional character with the words "sexy cosplay" added and find a slutted up version of it should definitively settle this.
And now they've been trying this for over a decade and it's failed every single time. These are just the first signs of the companies finally backpeddling.
