Regardless of how well these characters are written, I'll always know the developers have to tick that off from a checklist.
"Always?"
Does that work both ways? When you see a straight white male character, do you say to yourself "oh, it's just the developers checking off a tick on the 'marketability' checklist by trying to appeal to their default audience?"
Isn't it the same thing? I mean, everyone wants well-thought-out, well-written protagonists, and nobody is objecting to games that have them, regardless of their race. But when people complain about how over-represented white, or straight, and male characters are as leads in gaming, their point is that it's far far more common to have a checklist with "white straight male" on it. The point isn't to substitute that checklist with one with minorities on it, the point is to encourage writers to
think about the gender and race and sexuality of their characters rather than just going for the default or going for the "safe" option of what they think sells, and to (hopefully) see a bit more variety than we get from the current checklist-driven white-straight-male-as-default system. When you have 3% of the games at E3 with female leads or whatever, it's obvious that nobody is thinking about it.
A writer who uses a certain race or gender or sexuality because it's the
default (or who does it because "it's what sells") is certainly no better than the writer ticking off token representation from a list, right?