Amusingly the current community choice is all female protagonists (Tomb Raider, Mirror's Edge, They Bleed Pixels and Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams). Can't remember what the category was called though.
Haha, nice catch! Not just gender-neutral, gender-choice, or tits for the sake of tits either. All four of those games feature tasteful female protagonists, that's pretty ironic.
Probably should have kept track of everything coming through the daily sales to do a better survey of male/female characters in popular games. Might be a project if I find a few hours when I'm not playing one of the new games I bought. Pretty sure there will be a list somewhere.
For Steam, at least, it appears 174 games have received enough "female protagonist" tag-votes to be listed here:
http://store.steampowered.com/tag/en/Female%20Protagonist/That apparently includes at least some bi-gender games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, though not all (Fallout 3 is missing it, for example).
But yeah, 174 games out of the Steam library were considered Female-Protagonist enough to earn a tag. I'm not sure what to compare that to, exactly. There are thousands of games on Steam - a few of my friends have the 500+ badge - so I think this value, while proving nothing, strongly supports what many of us see as obvious:
Games featuring female protagonists are uncommon. I'd confidently estimate that <10% of games that make it to Steam feature only female protagonists. I don't have a good estimate for how many games allow gender to be chosen, but many of those are included in the 174 figure. Even if 50% of games offer female protagonist options, that's still a 10% to 40% split between female-only and male-only games.
And that's ignoring whether the female protagonist is an exaggerated pin-up meant to attract immature male gamers. The 174 figure includes such "protagonists".
So with respect, Neonivek, I must dispute your claim (; It seems clear that the majority of games feature male protagonists only.
Not that we can fix sexism by making more games with DD half-naked bimbo heroes. The problem isn't that games don't feature females. It's the number of females in interactive media who are insulting caricatures, insulting both real women and the male gamers to which they're marketed. We need more healthy female role models in gaming, and also more power fantasies for female gamers to play as. We *also*, separately, need to avoid systematically portraying women as more helpless than men.
That said, background NPCs are naturally weak and without agency. I was not impressed with this latest video, as it lengthily claimed female background NPCs were being singled out for exploitation in sandbox games. Background NPCs in sandbox games all exist to be toyed with, male or female.
And GTA portrays a gritty, criminal fantasy world. It would be weird for these murderers and drug pushers to mysteriously shun prostitution... they're *bad*. Their immorality is obvious, and the point. Bad things happen to these bad people, because they're bad. GTA isn't parody cake, it's a morality play.
Now the Saints Rows series, that's parody cake.