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(1) Ethan Strauss's "Undecided Whale" effect: The majority of money spent on AAA videogames is spent by young men. However, women control far more total discretionary spending than men overall, and can be spurred to spend on some games. Therefore, there's a significant incentive for executives looking to expand their sales figures to try and appeal to women, which given the recent massive leftward political shift of young women, often results in the insertion of hamfisted political messaging.
(2) Overrepresentation of Trans and other sexuality/subculture minorities in STEM. This one isn't complicated; transwomen, furries, and other nerds with odd subcultural affiliations around gender and sexuality are overrepresented in programming and among the type of monomanaically-focused near-autist who are more likely to go into intense knowledge-work professions like game design and creation. Thus, they're perfectly positioned to influence products from within.
(3) Standard labor law and NGO pressure-group tactics. See Hanania and Rufo.
Uh what. Women already control 75% of discretionary spending, and the encouragement is to... empower women?
I think the idea is that relatively little of the 75% of discretionary spending by women is being captured by games while a lot of the 25% of discretionary spending controlled by men is captured by games. This makes appealing to women relatively more attractive as a vector for making money. You don't need to convert as many of them as you do men for a similar payoff, which in theory should be easier.
My guess is that this is the correct explanation. 10+ years ago, when I was all-in on social justice, the prevailing belief was that the primary reason women didn't play video games in exactly the same amounts as men was that the video games hadn't been designed to appeal to them, with most of the rest of the reasons being the video game community being misogynistic and hostile to women. Thus, by changing the way the games were designed, the theory went, video game companies could tap this untapped market and make even more massive profits, all the while also making the world a better, more Socially Just place. How convenient it is that we live in a world where doing what matches my preferred ideology also results in making more money! You'd have to be a complete idiot or an extremist bigot not to pick up that free money that's just sitting there on the table!
I think the recent high profile failures of "woke" games (arguable if "woke" is the same as "trying to appeal to women," but one of the core arguments for uglifying women in "woke" content is that such things are more relatable/appealing to women) such as Concord, Star Wars: Outlaws, or Dragon Age: The Veilguard show that many of the people in charge of the purse strings were true believers of this theory.
I believe that the lesson that those people will learn is that this proves that the video game community is even more misogynistic than they thought, and also that the content directed at pulling in woman customers in these games didn't go nearly far enough, and therefore next time they need to double down and also bully the existing toxic primarily-male gamer fanbase even more, so as to make the space more friendly to women. After all, when you're on the right side of history, you cannot fail, you can only be failed by all the bigots around you who have just not caught on yet that they're headed for extinction.
I remember, back in the GamerGate days, that there was actually a statistic claiming that (slightly) over half of gamers were women--however, that statistic rows against the belief you described. The under-publicized explanation for that statistic was "women prefer simple, low-time-investment mobile games like Candy Crush and aren't playing COD or AssCreed,*" and I think failing to understand that is why bigger companies and gaming-related insititutions have spent the past decade flailing and floundering about with progressivism--the classic "things vs. people" gender divide.
*Not that there aren't women who are into traditional "hardcore" games at all, mind you.
On a somewhat less culture-war-ish note, consider the other primary impact of the low-time-investment Candy Crush mobile set on traditional gaming - the rise of microtransactions, games as a service, whale hunting, the transformation of the gaming industry into a bizarrely legitimized clone of the gambling industry. There clearly is actually a lot of money in chasing the success of Candy Crush.
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Precisely! I mean, there's no point in empowering chumps who don't spend money, right? A business genius looks at that situation and says "women spend money like crazy, but vidya is male dominated! If we could only get women to buy our wire monkey of masculine development we'd be rolling in dough! I know, let's paint it pink!"
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