Where did I say it's not a valid criticism? It's a fine criticism, I don't personally agree with it but that doesn't make it invalid. I disagree with the notion that a female protagonist, and therefor a flushed out female character, would make GTA a better, more fun game. Other people think they would get more enjoyment out of that sort of a game. We're all correct because it comes down to our subjective enjoyment of a product.
Also, I take issue with the way you frame Rockstar's choice of protagonists. "I mean, if Rockstar just doesn't want to have complex female characters in its games, fine, that's their right." Really, you think that's their thought processes? That they don't want complex female characters? Rockstar has chosen to make a series of games which focus on male protagonists and their stories. They have not chosen to ignore women, they have chosen to focus on men. Those are two very different things.
This is true, in that one implies a certain amount of malice or prejudice, while the other simply implies--well, I don't know. Lack of ambition? An unwillingness to rock a particular boat or leave a particular comfort zone?
I mean, imagine someone said, "it's not that I don't like writing black protagonists, I'm just much more comfortable writing white protagonists." That can be true even if the author is not racist. There are plenty of wholly legitimate reasons why someone might decide to do this. You're probably right in that Rockstar or the Housers probably don't sit down in a boardroom and say, "feminists are ruining everything, let's stick it to them by not making our protagonists female!"
Maybe they're worried about screwing it up. Near the end of
this GDC Vault presentation about how school-age boys and girls perceive video games, a developer asks how best to approach the task of writing a viable female character when his own experiences are those of a man; this is not an uncommon concern. Perhaps they're worried their audience won't follow (an apparent myth that GDC presentation tries to fight). Maybe they just don't give a shit about writing a character women can relate to better than men. All of these can be concerns, held without malice, that lead to the choice of a man as a protagonist.
But that's kind of the point of my original post: keeping the status quo and always writing male protagonists, or not writing interesting female characters into your games, is easy. And so long as people keep taking the easy choice, the one that causes the least friction with your perceived audience, the one that raises the fewest eyebrows from your publishers, we will never get beyond where we are now. And we'll always fail at this because of the cycle I described in my first post, and because of plenty of other cycles used to justify why we can't possibly have a decent woman character here, or have this character over there be a person of colour, or come up with a backstory for this character that does justice to their transgender struggles, or whatever. We will continue to face a never-ending chain of protagonists that all seem pretty similar, have the same struggles, dream the same dreams, lead the same lives. If nothing else, that future is boring as shit.
So yeah, I think it's worth noting that Rockstar doesn't seem interested in having complex female characters in its games, even if it doesn't set out to specifically exclude them. Because if they honestly cared very much about that sort of thing, they would find a way to do it. They would make it a priority.
