Hmmm, I'm surprised that nobody has brought up "Saint's Row" with it's character customization, and how many people were jumping all over the chance to play a female character in "Saint's Row 2". When the game came out it seems like 75% of the traffic on Gamefaqs and a few other sites was about people showing off their crime queens and so on. I even made one myself.
Other than that, I will point out that for those who have listed off tons of female characters, that only a tiny handfull of them have actually held down a blockbuster game. The gaming industry on the other hand is littered with the "corpses" of games that have tried to feature female protaganists that didn't do very well. Of course then again a lot of that comes down to budget, and how good the games were themselves. A company like Activision that is focusing on "AAA" titles based on corperate forecasting is not incorrect that male characters are infinatly more successful. For every "Samus Aran" you can probably find two or three well known male characters from successful game franchises. Let's say they are rating the odds of success as like 33% for a female character and 66% for a guy (with like 1% for the off chance someone might want to create a game about a Hermaphrodite or whatever) when the guys with the money roll the dice they want the best chance of success.
Of course corperations have never been good at the creative process itself, the next blockbuster is usually something risky that does really well, and is then the fodder the industry will exploit from there on out.
While I was called a Misogynist recently (by someone who didn't even seem to know what the word actually means, but it still burns), I will also stick my neck out and say that creating female characters comes with it's one suite of special challenges. A male action hero is a male action hero, they differ in their personalities and such but are rarely put under a magnifying glass. With women it tends to be differant where as soon as you decide to make a female protaganist you have to deal with people who are going to jump on a perfect physical specimin (the way male heroes are in their own way) and start screaming about eye candy, and "burn fantasy art" and so on (even if the artists happen to be female). Then of course you come down to the matter of personality and how such a character can act, this also gets examined under a microscope. As "Yahtzee" pointed out in one of his rants on Tomb Raider, Lara Croft has gone through massive personality re-writes over the year, where she started out as a somewhat playful treasure hunter in the mould of an "Indiana Jones" villain, the attention she got as eye candy seemed to result in her being re-interpeted as a sort of Amazon "I am woman, hear me roar" type of character.
The point here being is that as much as it would be nice to have a female character who just goes out and does her thing, the fact that it's a female character means that the issue of her femininity HAS to be brought up and commented on for some reason. We need to have some comments about men (good, bad, or neutral) just for the sake of having the comments, even if it's just a groan worthy comment about being a heroine in a man's world or something. Writers should stay away from it, but they will be made to get into it, and in the end it comes down sort of like what would happen if an action blockbuster (either game or movie) featuring he-men, had scenes involved where the characters pointedly commented about their masculinity and their place in the world or something. Just as a healthy, busty, young lady might make comments about this in a game "just because she needs to", imagine what would happen if say Chris Redfield made some comments about his unusually sized biceps the same way without it being intended as a joke "Yes, I do have arms bigger around than my neck, but stop looking at the awesome definition, I have a face you know? And we need to focus on the mission at hand".
That said, we'll see what happens down the road.
Oh and for the record, I agree about anonymous sources for the most part, I will however point out that with a series name like "True Crime" it's possible that the idea of the female lead was nixed (assuming it was part of the same series) largely because organized crime tends to be very sexist, and while there were some rare exceptions (and countless works of fantasy), I think they are out to build off of a stereotype. The Lucy Liu thing (Payback, Kill Bill) might be entertaining, but I think shows like "The Sopranos" and various Yakuza/Triad dramas represented the more realistic, yet still cinematic/fantastic approach they were going for. "Saint's Row 2" proved it *CAN* work, and perhaps we'll see the "Black Lotus" idea at some point outside of that franchise..... of course I could be wrong here if it was intended to be it's own title to begin with (I'm sort of confused on that point since when they finished it, it was a True Crime game which is a franchise, something that implies it was conceived as part of the franchise to begin with... I can't say too much about True Crime in general as I have yet to play that series).
