This business model is very much high risk, high reward. If all the stars happen to align just right, you might stumble on a new Fortnite and then you are set. However, that is very unlikely to happen, as we have seen many a time already. The market is saturated and once people get hooked onto something, it will require something extraordinary to loosen their grip and try the new thing. You are likely to throw years of development and hundreds of millions into the wind.
Long development times don't help, and if you are just trying to catch a trend wave, you will always be late to the party.
Oof, what a misstep for Sony. And it has come at a cost with regards to their core identity. Sad times.

I am afraid this is an assertion without proof, or even argument.

Yes, many words have grammatical genders. It is the same in my mother language (german) too. But the question is not if they have one. It is if that grammatical gender is directed and dictated by a social construct – our modern understanding of gender – or by sex. And gender as we understand it is so young, that it could not possibly have played a role in forming the decisions of what person gets what pronoun.

And I get that social roles can be old. But a man not conforming to social roles, or in fact exclusively practicing female social roles, would still be a man for all the understanding we had on this topic until five minutes ago.

Also, please consider this: gender, as modernity dictates, is a spectrum. So how come we only now get a spectrum of gendered pronouns and up until recently only had he/she – a binary? Because it is in direct relation to and consequence of another binary – sex. It is also an extremely modern mindset, that gender is everything and sex says rather little about an individual.

“The pronouns are just to identify what is the gender of the character. It’s just that.”

“The pronouns are just a way to make the player understand what are the gender of the robots and non-human characters”

A lot of people like the idea and theory of gender. But please note that it is just that, a theory. Set up in a way so it can never be proven or disproven. Unintelligible, non-empirical. My opinion, as I actually argued (above) is, that pronouns are not a way to identify what gender a character has, but what sex.

Now a robot does not have a sex. But it can be programmed to come across as if it had. And if alien reproduction turns out not to work like it does with the human binary sex, then perhaps different pronouns, like “it” could be in order. But I cannot imagine the concord devs thought so deeply about it.

But since pronoun choices also apply (presumably in concord too) to humans (and not just to robots and aliens) your point is moot again. Also, why choose pronouns at all, if they are dictated by how the fictional characters would feel inside or what social roles they take on? This at least should not be your choice but the characters. But since it is your choice, it is about you, not about humans, robots, aliens or anything else. This is just for the player. And this is also a common thread in the gender discourse – self-obsession – a downright recipe for unhappiness.

And please don’t call people deranged or having brain rot, just because they do not believe in this unproven gender theory and think that pronouns work differently than you do.

You are pointing out how “they” can in fact refer to companies, even though these are single nouns. Makes just perfect sense for me too: sony is a thing, a company. But it is comprised of many people. So, when we talk about sony doing something, we mean the people working there. “They” did that. I am afraid this does not address my complaint at all: using plural pronouns for a singular person (not company).

And I would say how you refer to your cat as “they”, even though he / she is a singular pet and has a sex, is wrong. That one does not concern me much though. Perhaps I did not lay out my concerns clearly enough in my comment. So another try: talk the way you want. And if you want me to refer to you as the sex you are not, depends on you (how you look mostly).

What concerns me most is that gender (not sex) quickly becomes a protected category in legislation. In the UK for example thousands of people are charged with wrong think, wrong speak, wrong post online etc., because they would not want their speech dictated by a tiny, authoritarian, censorious mob of bullies. (I am not accusing anyone here of being part of that group.) I see “misgendering as a hate crime” in the same category as “you spoke the name of the lord in vain, 10 whips on the back”. And Concord, by inclusion of pronoun choices, gives legitimisation to these people and this claim: “as long as I perceive hate, it was given criminally, and the level of my indignation should be equivalent to your punishment.” That is horrible of course, but the woke crowd, clearly seizable enough to influence legislation like this, is exactly behind such statements.– I know this sounds hyperbolic, but the list of people suffering because of the gender-craze is almost never ending (including the ones prosecuted because of thought-crime and the poor women having to deal with ill men in their sports, in their changing rooms, in their prisons, as much as the ones misdiagnosed with gender-illness themselves and how they are treated medically and many, many others).

And it is true that social roles have existed forever. But not gender. Not how we think of it today. Not in the sense that gender, instead of sex, dictates if somebody is a man or a woman. Not in the sense that people can be neither, as long as that is what they feel internally. Not in the sense that sex becomes utterly unimportant, given how we are just tabula rasa and everything is nurture. That is extremely new. That is from Simone de Beauvoir (a certified dolt) and John Money (suffering from gender-illness himself and a paedophile monster), among others. (And just as an aside: I never get how “this is old” is an argument for the good quality of something. There are many old ideas we now thankfully live without.)

To your amusing suggestions about performing anatomical exams before using pronouns for any person: No. You know that we are a sexually dimorphic species. Men look different from women not because of how they feel inside (gender), but because of their biology (sex). I am basing my pronoun use on how people look (sex). Very rarely it is the case that how people feel inside makes their outward appearance closer to the other sex. But again, if a man puts on a wig and wants to be called “she”, perhaps.

You also made two claims I want to question: 1) Gender-ill people are constantly discriminated against. I don't see much proof of that. 2) Using incorrect grammar makes someone feel seen and respected. I don't see much proof of that either. It should not be our highest goal to appease the mentally ill the way they see fit. We should much rather try to really help them. Also, your suggestion at the end should be mentioned, too, in parapharse - please tell me if I misrepresent you: ("Nobody gives a shit" and "The only ones who do are sus" =) I know what group of people are the only ones ever complaining about misuse of language - the racists and sexists. Is that you saying how "sus" it is if somebody disagrees with you on language?

Pronouns aren't binary. 

English has used "they" as a singular for hundreds of years. 

There are tons of different classes of pronouns in different languages. Quite a few languages have more genders than 2.

I think a big thing today is that we have a lot more information. If 1% of people were trans in the year 1500, you probably didn't know a single person. You lived in a very tiny town or potentially a several hour walk away from town. Especially if trans people aren't accepted, and are forced to be quiet, or otherwise get murdered for how they were born.

Today, not only do we have a lot more information on how bodies develop and how the brain develops, we also have a lot more connectivity. I can find 500 stories from 500 trans people in a couple of hours online. Practically 500 times more information than was even available to people, even 100 years ago frankly.  

Sex is also a spectrum. People develop differently. There are people who develop both sets of sex organs, not the way they chose to be born. There are people with other sets of chromosomes. There's a whole spectrum of how and which sex organs develop. Some people have internal female sex parts, and external male parts.  

99% of people generally fit pretty close to one category or the other, so we pretty much pretend that it's just a binary. 

And for some reason, this reality gets denied, or swept away as "those people are exceptions". As if that changes anything. The strongest man in the world must not really exist, because there's only 1 of him. 

That's not what the word theory means. 

A scientific theory is the best explanation that we have that fits all the empirical evidence. It is empirical. 

Transgender is from empirical evidence. 

Gravity is also "just a theory".

It's not unintelligible and non-empirical.

To be honest, I think your robot example is pretty self-defeating. 

We've culturally accepted that C-3PO is a "he", despite the fact that "he" doesn't have sex. No one would bat an eye about calling "him" a "he", because he fits our gender expectations. He has a "male" voice and a "male" body. 

Does Concord have pronoun "choices"? I was under the impression that the whole thing was that it told people what identification was being used for each character. 

Most seem just fine to me, some even good. Some are not great for sure, to put it nicely, but that one particular skin got way more attention than it deserved. Discussion about the main skins would have been more fruitful, and maybe it was on, uh, page 6/10? Yeah, I'm not reading that many posts when I want to address one point. I can't really see most of the characters really being major draws, but probably not bad enough to warrant such low sales either. Perhaps great character designs could have made the game successful, but considering how badly the game's done sales-wise, I doubt such greatness was ever likely, and just a good level of character design would probably not have cut it. I think the game would probably have needed more draws than just more appealing character design, but yes, better character design would certainly have helped. That at least my impression of the situation.

They're not the ones who are wrong.

Every word only has meaning, because of how they get used. 

There is no stone tablet dictating how any word is supposed to get used. The reason why every language exists and every word exists, is because enough people are using those words to mean those things.

If a substantial number of English speakers tomorrow decide to start using the word "flulu" to mean "men", then that is what that word means. 

The fact that people have used "they" to refer to a singular, means that is what that word means. 

The word "sun" only means the big object in the sky, because a large number of people are using that word to refer to it that way. 

This is a basic part of how language works. 

Except we're not that sexually dimorphic.

It's more like this: 

There are lots of people in the middle who are pretty androgenous. 

There are lots of women who have very masculine features and men who have very feminine features. 

Just wanted to point out this is factually incorrect. Non conforming Gender identity has historically been a spectrum in different cultures in the past. it might be new to you but people have been gender non conforming for centuries.

The Indonesians Waria people are gender non conforming have been around since atleast the 1600s. 
The Hijra people of India/Bangladesh are gender non conforming and were first mention in texts in the 1800s.
Mexico's Zapotec's Muxe people are gender non conforming. They've been around since 500 BCE.
Ancient Babylonians Sal-Zikrum aka Woman-Man were gender non conforming individuals.

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Tell me what one is good and why. Tell me what the design tells you about the character. The whole principle of good character design is their design tells you a lot about them like personality traits without context. None of them do that.