They're trying to skirt the line between keeping the vocal twitter slacktivists happy while not actually cutting shit from the game that would anger the user base. Assumedly they could ignore the issue entirely but since they are always trying to get their profits maximized they probably figure that throwing such a minimal bone to the woke types will get them more praise and attention at low risk.

That article about the Nintendo game recently is a great example. Bunch of people were praising the game for it's queer framing and what not non-binary hubba jubba post gender bologna. Thing was the only difference was that instead of having "Choose your Sex" they wrote "Choose your character" instead or some such and just removed the words boy and girl from the menu, despite there being two obviously gendered options.

Frankly I'm in the "I don't really care" camp with this sort of thing. I find it to be stupid and annoying but it's such a minor issue it won't really influence my purchasing habits one way or another. Which I think is what they are banking on. I do find it to be absolutely hilarious that simply removing the text that says "male and female" is enough to get high praise from the gender specials. They really are more concerned with words than anything else.

I think this will eventually backfire on the companies though. Twitter culture war stuff doesn't equate to sales, a lot of the people who complain the loudest aren't going to be buying this stuff anyway, and that goes for both sides, but while we could argue that all publicity is good publicity, there's a certain acceleration of social media culture wars where people will always complain about something no matter what and it will grow to a point where they'll end up in a "unwinnable" position with the social media opinion. It gets where a game I've never even heard of I find out about through some culture war piece, I wasn't going to buy it before, I'm less likely to buy it after, so it's like anti-marketing in a way. It's the same as if they do culture war stuff I'm inclined to agree with, yeah I think it's funny but it's pandering ain't it? I don't want to play a video game to reinforce my ideology, I just want to play a fun game. Anything that isn't a game first kind of marketing to me suggests that maybe they aren't confident the game will do well on its own merits?

But whether or not you call the male option (male option) or you call it (body type a) is such a minor issue I frankly don't care. It's a video game, doesn't matter. It's just stupid.