Personally, having worked in the film industry, I think a lot of these people running things, are very stuck on the old formulas that worked in the past. They are obsessed with it. And they aren't interested in data showing anything else. Because they don't even want to attempt to move away from something that has worked in the past. I can't say that's 100% true for all major publishers. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe their research/data is correct, and female leads are a risk.
I think this plays a big role in it. Gaming, especially right now with how expensive games are, is a follow the leader industry. You'll see every generation there will be certian types of games that are popular which will cause many publishers to just try to imitate that. During the PSone days the most popular games were JRPG's, platformers, and survival horror. And as a result you saw a ton of those games during that period. Pretty much every company had some cute platformer on their roster because they were selling like hotcakes.
Then in the next generation we saw open world games become big. Then every company wanted to have some sort of open world game on their roster. And in the last gen it was of course TPS/FPS. And everyone wanted to have those. But it's not just the genre, it's also the characters. Publishers tend to stick to the blueprint as a whole. "That company made a super successful shooter with a white male lead, so we're going to do the same."
So it's not surprising that companies that tend to break that mold are ones that don't really follow those paths. Companies like Sony and Nintendo are platform holders, so it's more important for them to stand out than to simply blend in. Which is why you'll see them being more likely to fund games that don't necessarily fit into those molds. The same applies to Japanese devs as a whole on some level as they don't really make many FPS/TPS. Companies like Capcom and NAMCO have noted that 30-40% of the userbases for games like Basara and Tales are female. And they've noted that those gamers tend to be the most hardcore as they make up the overwhelming majority of those that attend the fan festivals for the games.
Still, I think it's important to ask: how are they getting this data. What does the data say. And how are they coming to their conclusion. I think those are important things to wonder. That one Dev that spoke out and said that, the publisher was using slanted research to reinforce the narrative they wanted to hear, has been my experience in Film. It's basically what I said where, these people DO NOT WANT to move off the old formula.
It's quite possible that it is slanted. They hire groups to do this for them. And if the group isn't even trying to hear from female gamers, then it's not surprising that publishers could get the wrong impression. While it's note exactly the same thing, Naughty Dog noted that research group that they were using to playtest The Last of Us had no plans at all to bring in female gamers. They had to specifically tell them to bring them into the process. So when you hear something like that, it's not hard to believe that another group may not even really pay much attention to female gamers when doing research on whose buying games.
