Microsoft, financing the product are perfectly entitled to stipulate what they want.
If you don't want to be tied down to someone else's ideas/vision self funded/indie is the only way.
That said, it doesn't mean I like that they said it had to have a white guy. I think the lion head idea would have probably stood out more.
It's not as bad as almost every box art having to have an angry guy pointing a gun at you as we had in the US market in the ps2 days though.








