It's a challenge. I had to lower the difficulty in Uncharted to Very Easy to make up for the fact I kept not noticing enemies.

I'm pretty sure there are more female characters than male in video games.

I prefer when developers stay close to their vision and not ruin it because "equality".
I don't want to see Linka, or Ado, or Lean just for the sake of change without anything substantial to support it.

Evie Frye is the GREATEST thing to happen to Assassins creed since Ezio.  

i couldnt care less if a character is a male or female as long as the story and overall gameplay is intact and the game is actually good and or fun

I can't understand this perspective well at all. Namely the part where there's the assumption that this is some alleged plan from publishers to be perceived as being politically correct.

A gaming protagonist affirmative action of sorts. Not buying it. I doubt an unmeasured, imperceptible action is being taken here. I think the far safer, but still presumptuous, assumption, with there being far less reaching, is that it is either based on marketing research or is creatively driven. Or perhaps I'm naive and it is. I would still argue that it's irrelevent. 

The other part I can't quite understand in the identification issue.  Are gamers so wildly arrogant that we so easily identify with, at many times infallible, heroes. Not only that, but we can look past all of the other defining characteristics of these heroes that we most readily lack such as: being in ridiculous shape, being the centre of almost seemingly everyone's universe, being uniquely qualified to save the world, having super powers, having the sexual charisma of Neil deGrasse Tyson or the comical wit of Stephen Merchant, being the most compassionate person in history. The list could go on and on of things that I would imagine to be harder to identify with than being female. Would you really rate being a man so high on how you identify yourself? I identify as being male as well but certainly not more favourably than many other characteristics. I'm trying to say that is wrong to do so either, just surprising to me.

As to the final part of your post, I'm continually amazed how victimized many males feel these days. Though I'd prefer not to go down this road as I'd rather talk about the above for this particular thread, I have to ask: How do you know more females bash gaming than men? I'm not saying otherwise as I've never seen any evidence of it, just simply asking how you came into this knowledge? If it were true, though, I would imagine it being attributable to being largely portrayed from a male perspective (which of course is not a inherently bad or good thing).

It would bother me that developers would be forcing themselves to have a female protagonist, not that the protagonist is a female per se. The same thing applies for the race of a character, specially if the race, and sometimes gender too, was previously established and is changed just for the sake of being "progressive" or because it's "2016" /cough *Thor* /cough...

I don't remember playing many games with a female protagonist that I liked, except for Tomb Raiders and FFX-2 (yes, I liked it, deal with it D:). I don't have a problem that there are so few of those games.

I find the whole "gender representation" ridiculous, to be honest. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't relate to fictional characters nor real life people on the basis of what they have or don't have in their pants and obviously won't represent me just because of that. A male president doesn't represent all males, a male CEO doesn't represent all males, a congressman doesn't represent all males, etc, and I believe their women counterparts don't represent all women either, specially in a fictional setting.

I do think it is logical, to some extent (read paragraph above), that if most gamers are males (supposedly), most protagonist will be male. And adding to that, most gamers being straight too, it would also make sense to have a desireable female protagonist every now and then /cough *Tomb Raider* /cough

I only wish for developers and publishers to have the balls in creating whatever they want, how ever they want regardless of pointless whiny outside forces /cough *social justice warriors* /cough. Maybe the press wouldn't support them so much, but i'm sure gamers would.

That's one nasty cough you have there

Is it possible that developers finally have the balls to make what they want thanks to evil social justice warriors???
That there may be less backlash involved in attempting to create women characters with depth???
That games like Metroid Other M are criticized not for giving women voices in video games, but for making them look like brooding adolescents instead of strong women who have survive trauma and adversity???
That maybe it is a challenge with which creators within the industry genuinely want to experiment???

Truest sentence I've seen in this thread yet, if only the feminists would come to understand that. I agree with you, developers and publishers should have the freedom to target their actual audience and not try hard to appease the vocal few who probably won't even purchase the game anyways.