Video Game Romance

If there's only one, I hope he's awesome and this isn't a Zevran situation for me. I'm not super picky about love interests (I've enjoyed my various Bioware husbands despite the fact that Gil is the only one who's actually my type), but unmodded DAO is too rough.

That is different. Those games were designed to have a set character of set gender.  Crystal Dynamics never said 'oh we wanted to give a gender option but we ran out of money' They said 'this is Tomb Raider, Lara Croft is the protag'

Dontnod wanted to make a game about teenage girl so they did, now they are making on about a male Vampire. Fans of Dontnod can of course express their disappointment that after 2 female led games, they are now doing a male led one, challenge their thinking on it and highlight how few female led games there still are, but regardless of their logic behind doing so, their original idea for the game was to have a male led. 

Spiders wanted to have both genders, they even began to design the game with two genders (potentially the reason why there is m/m romances is because they had begun to design romances for both & then once the cut happened it was just as easy to leave all the romance options in, rather than cut out the male ones too) and then cut out that option, like it was unimportant.  And that is their decision, they only have so much budget and they have to design what to put in and what to cut out but that doesn't mean I should be happy with the fact that they thought of it and buy the game so they have a bigger budget for Greedfall. 

Believe you me, I am the first person to complain when a new game gets released and it's protag is just another generic brown hair guy, even if that was the vision for the game but it is different when a company actively decides against having a female protag, not because of the story or the vision of the game, but because of budget or 'risk'.

I mean if they only had budget for one protag, why cut the female one and not the male one? As far as I can see from comments about the game, there would be no difference to it if Zachariah were a woman. The fact that they did that indicates they think of male as the default gender for a protagonist, which is a big problem in the game industry (in media in general really) that I don't feel like rewarding.

I'm reminded of Elex where I think.. okay so you had the time and resources and money to make big sprawling levels and intricate plotlines but a female character is too much?    
So it's clear that there are resources, the question is how they get allocated- and often again and again it's so that they allot a shitton of resources for little things to make all more immersive but that could be cut out without having too much of an effect, but the choice are again and again to rather make a new level or design a new enemy instead of using that time and resources to offer a female option for the main character.    

I mean I get that money is few, but sometimes I think I rather have less maps, less voiced dialogue, fewer side quests (also done by writers, artists & voice actors- the people who would do a character design, voice lines and a bit of dialogue.) than not having an option to change gender in games where you don't have a predefined main character. 

because if the game sells well they still could add new maps and quests in a DLC (okay they could also add a female character as a dlc)
but I think if you only have the gender swap, not modify any dialogue exempting pronoun and just modify/rescale the clothing then making a female character shouldn't cost so much time and resources- and if you find a good way to scale armor and clothing for the female model you can use that method for the next games too.