It's a more nuanced situation than people generally want to accept.

>Marketing is made so they you identify with the product or identify with an aspirational version of yourself. Gaming is seen as heavily male-dominated. Expanding that is smart.

This is the most simple and probably accurate explanation. Companies like to make money, untapped markets look like money.

The problem is that then, the current audience, who is primarily male, can raise concerns about the marketing not catering to them anymore.

There's a political arm who doesn't like that at all, and they will not only attempt to enforce collective delusion to dismiss the whole thing (what do you mean? everybody plays videogames, playerbase is split 50/50 pretty much!), but invalidate the very idea that a primarily male audience can have grievances about being catered to.

This makes them look insane and alienates the original audience politically speaking, and ironically, makes the original audience look bigoted, which puts consumers off.

This dance has been going on for like a decade and a half at this point and it's only recently that signs of it dying down have started to show. I can only hope.