I've been noticing this type of shit for years. It got played off a lot with stuff like censorship and adding """progressive""" ideas into gaming, and I was like "Whatever, I can ignore it and just play the games I like".
Then it just kept increasing and increasing, and I actually stopped for a minute and asked myself "Why?" Like why are they doing this in video games of all things? I've come up with a few answers myself, no sources, just what I think.
- Videogames are relatively young/new as a platform. There are a lot of people that want to see videogames as a legitimate art form instead of just consumable entertainment, so there's a pressure on those people to seem more adult or progressive or whatever to be taken seriously. I think this is the first problem that allows for the rest. This is also why for a ton of bigger AAA games, the idea of presentation and hollywood like story has taken over for gameplay and fun mechanics, in my opinion.
- Children and teens play games. Children and teens are much more impressionable than adults, who mostly have their worldview set already. This is a great target for people that want to instigate change, because it's not obvious to the targets. If I keep playing games that tell me that LGBQTIA+ people are the new norm, that will start to seep in. At least that's my opinion of the idea behind it.
- Graphic violence has become totally acceptable, where as women fanservice has become such a ridiculous taboo. This one isn't so much of an answer, but it's something I've definitely noticed over the past 10 years. In the early days of gaming, even before we had hyper realistic character models, violence was the big scare, that we would desensitize ourselves to violence and become violent ourselves. Now, violence is praised and awarded (MK11, TLoU2), but any provocative women fanservice should be immediately shut down. Then you get shouted at from the top of Mt. Morals if you don't agree. To be honest, I'm not really sure of the reason behind this one. It's been happening in movies, trade events, etc, all over the world. If this was truly a progressive stance, you would think you'd just see more equality of fanservice, not a complete shutdown of only the straight version of it.
I also don't understand how in the early 2010s, there was almost an immediate and complete sweep of game journalists that used to write about games, babes, other fun stuff, etc, to almost exclusively reporting on outrage, censorship, and virtue signaling. I'm not sure if it was just a domino effect of one journalist doing it, or if there really was something nefarious at play behind the scenes, but it was like a light switch that instantly "journos" were completely against the fans and patrons that they had been writing to for years.
Then Gamergate happens when some people finally had enough, and they were vilified and shat on from orbit. Fringe cases of idiots doing death threats and other garbage were made to seem the norm from people that opposed this shift, and there's no way that could have happened without some sort of organization or leadership guiding the whole movement. That one journalist that posts on GAF wrote a great article about this in detail, there was a thread that was definitely worth a read.
I realize some of this sounds like conspiracy theory stuff, but this movement has been way too quick and way too effective to just be a simultaneous massive swing of opinion in the industry. Then you read stuff that has been posted in this thread, and I at least can't help but get a little bit angry. I doubt I'll ever actually find out the truth about all of this bullshit, but god dammit I'm gonna at least make sure I think for myself and question all of this absolute horseshit that seems hellbent on changing this industry into something, frankly, not fun.