The video game industry understands that middle-aged white males don't want to play as a sassy black woman or a genderfluid teenage boy. The video game industry also understands that when people reach middle age, they tend to stop playing games as much. Kids, growing careers, whatever. The industry is trying to appeal to/draw in that younger audience, which does have their attention drawn by diverse/boundary-pushing characters (however you want to define that). Whether that's a smart move or not is above my paygrade, but that's the strategy. Middle aged men just can't fathom that they are no longer the main target demographic for video games.
The problem with your assessment is that the target demographic you're describing doesn't exist, and kids don't pay $60 to $70 for games because they don't have jobs. Kids these days play free-to-play battle royal games, which are (insofar as I know) largely absent of the political Marxist praxis bullshit that the expensive games have. Boys and men will always go for FPS games like Payday, CoD, Halo (rest in pepperoni) or Counter Strike, sometimes more complicated games like DOTA until they're successfully yelled out of the game or git gud. Platformers are more for a general audiences I imagine.
Point being a historical WWI/WWII game where a pink haired woman with a cyborg arm and baseball bat in hand appears apropos of nothing is nonsensical and clearly put there to achieve a political purpose, stir outrage or pass the outrage as the reason for the game's failure. I don't understand why you'd blow your own game up on purpose unless it were for tax breaks. If you were to play as the Night Witches, that would at least be historically accurate to the events of WW2, so why not just play as the Night Witches? Because it wouldn't piss off enough people, ironically.
The aim of making the main characters of your game gross trannies isn't to be transgressive against social norms, it's to be transgressive against your player base. If it's a sincere, genuine attempt to pander to a fresh audience, well it didn't work for Budweiser, so why would it work for vidya?
You also underestimate how many childhood gamers of yesteryear are actually customers for life, the majority of Twitch streamers are adults either nearing or already in their 30s, so all this does is serve to piss off an already entrenched customer base in favor of one that frankly just doesn't exist, if pandering was ever really the point that is.
But this will blow over eventually, since market corrections being what they are, the woke games will die on the branch because nobody will want to buy it.
) as an incredibly minor side character in an optional side quest that is dead before the events of the game even begin.
