Ok to the first part:
I am not talking about the issue that TOO much is catering towards men and not enough of the industry is homogenous, which is an issue. I am talking about the people who will instantly interpret a character as sexist or not sexist entirely by whether or not a man made it or if it is a female character made to be appealing to men.
Well considering the hiring rate of women in the game industry (i.e. like, tiny. I"ll get a number when I'm not at work.), I think I can say that there are pervasive sexist qualities in the majority of AAA games.
As for the second part...
Of course, but why are you making female abuse special? Could it be because you have the exact same sexism that pervades this whole thing... that women are "things" that need to be "protected" and thus games that show them in any sort of negative situation are wrong because women are small little flowers who are constantly and forever abused in real life?
Cause we aren't talking about very specific forms of abuse here. We are specifically talking about ANYTIME a woman is hurt by a man.
Edited because I cannot complain even here.
It's a problem because it super-trivializes the deaths of represented women, marking them as that "thing" you're talking about. It's reducing them to an object. It's saying "women aren't humans, this is just a plot point with legs and voice acting". It's trivializing the lives of, you know, a sex/gender that has been systematically trivialized their whole lives into "things" to have and play with, and it enforces that trivialization of women to men playing the games.
Theoretically shouldn't oversexualized female characters also appeal to lesbians as well as men?
The Male Gaze. Wonderful thing, that.
I don't think a lot of gamer males, especially developers realize why the violence against women by men is so serious. The general excuse is "men are violent in the game against men too and women against men." But this violence, to many people, especially women, underscores the casual violence our gender experiences on a day to day basis that is trivialized and suppressed by society at large.
How do you think that should be handled in a sandbox game environment which allows the player to conduct violence in general? I ask this because a lot of the criticism I've seen recently is related to violence against women you can conduct in sandbox games, rather than pre-scripted incidents. The criticism is phrased as in "you 'can' do x to a woman" when "x" is something that you can also do to other characters, like driving over them.
Sandbox is fine. It's the pre-scripts that's bad. If there's special things you can do to women above the norm in a sand-box -then- I have a problem.