>>5818315Let me break it down for you as much as possible.
First, female FPS autists existed already, but they are a bigger minority than they already were. Females in competitive esports-like scenes are exceptionally rare due to a fuckton of factors which could clog up a whole quarter of the /v/ catalog, so I won't get into those here. Suffice to say that females are a tiny % of all players in competitive games.
Low TTK games are generally an anathema to more casual/semi-casual audiences, meaning they get less exposure to the general public and lose out on large quantities of potential players.
Low-TTK FPS games are typically simulationist shit like the plethora of WW2 shooters, or Halo & Halo-adjacent games
Halo's TTK is actually not that low in most cases, but it's much lower than Apex.
The saturation of a couple of typical game aesthetics combined with an anti-casual gameplay loop turned off people as a whole, meaning the % of female players involved comes out to a lower quantity.
Apex and Overwatch offered different aesthetics to FPS games. Combined with a more casual approach (higher TTK, RNG-based loot) that still allows for skill-based competition (git gud with all the guns you fucking idiot), and you suddenly have a higher # of people playing. More people means that % demographics within those bodies of people are more visible. Thus, the illusion that girls are "suddenly" playing games. It's less that girls started playing games because they changed, and more that games decided to stop being completely stale shit in the same rough cut mold that's been in use since 1993.
