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Just getting regular sales data for retail games is difficult enough, let alone trying to parse out how an ongoing GaaS title is affected.
I think League has probably done well out of it, research suggested female players overwhelmingly played female characters while men played an equal mix - indicating that the male playerbase was unbothered while attracting new female players.
Battlefield V sold less than its predecessor according to Wikipedia, but still sold more than 7 million copies. Presumably there is some percentage of regular players who decided not to buy the game due to the woke marketing, alongside some percentage of new players who were attracted by it. 2142 looked a lot more regular in its marketing, so perhaps EA decided it wasn't worth it overall?
Women overwhelmingly play attractive female characters, the kind riot was always making. They are not champing at the bit to play Rek'Sai or Ambessa.
The pervasive myth that women want fat ugly characters in video games is so out of touch with the revealed preference of women who play games. If you want to know what kind of 'diverse' characters women want in games, look at the character designs coming out of Hoyoverse, not Firewalk Studios.
If we're talking about LoL specifically, I'd say female preference appears to tilt towards pretty/cute rather than attractive/sexy. Lux rather than Miss Fortune. And I think Riot's redesign of some earlier characters and move away from the high level of sexualisation (and general huge tits that a lot of the early female champs had) was probably a big deal for potential female players.
Nah, they don't play MF because she is an adc. Sona is just as busty, and is probably the number one most played character for women playing league. You can just look at the games that women actually play, they only play games where they can play as a hot girl, and they more or less exclusively play as hot girls*. In fact, I would say Lux (and Zoe, specifically these two) preference, codes trans woman more than woman, as far as league players go. There is probably a line where your game goes too far into the male gaze, like, Nikke is in theory a waifu collector like Genshin, but with no husbandos and outfits that look like they came from a slutty Halloween shop, it has basically no women playing it.
Of course, this is all miles away from woke injections, which look like Ambessa (Buff Old Black Girl Boss Brusier), not Lux. If Concord was full of characters that looked like Mercy, nobody would have complained about how Woke the character design was.
*Edit, this is overstated, they will also play cute games, like Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, Pokémon, etc.
Ironically, women do seem to love Eve from Stellar Blade, ShiftUp's newest game.
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