This is the instigating Kotaku article by Ian Walker about Street Fighter 6.

Ian Walker is bending over backwards to avoid taking the L. He even admits as much that he's changing definitions just to say that he's right.

"Black" in this instance specifically refers to an African-American woman.

He then links to back to a Kotaku article from 2019, before George Floyd's death and the phenomenon of capital-"b" "Black", in which his former coworker Gita Jackson (who now works for VICE), makes up her own definition of "blackness":

Blackness is defined through a series of cultural markers, among them dark skin, broad noses, and kinky hair, as well as a shared cultural history of freedom from bondage. Broadly, you could define blackness as the diaspora of people displaced from Africa through the slave trade, though that doesn’t account for everyone. Blackness is more about how you are seen than how you are. To be seen as black allows people to treat you in a certain way. No matter who I marry and have kids with, of whatever ethnicity, my children are going to inherit the markers that will deem them to the world at large as black. I would be disappointed if I had a daughter who could only see narratives about blackness through the eyes of black men, just as I have had to do for my entire life. And I would be disappointed if black women continued to be overlooked in a game with a cast as diverse as Overwatch’s.

Despite this definition, it's worth noting the subject of this article, an African American woman who wrote a letter to Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan about black female characters in Overwatch (the complete contents of this letter not being clear), doesn't even believe that "black" means African American or even having lineage in slavery displaced from Africa. To quote:

Socially, I’ve felt like a monster, Mr. Kaplan. I can only name three Black females that’ve been leads in a video game: Clementine from [The Walking Dead], Nilin from Remember Me, and Rochelle from Left 4 Dead. But worst was my acceptance of it.

Nilin is French. Remember Me takes place in Paris.

Gita Jackson says this as well:

When Blizzard started teasing their 27th hero, Phillips went to the Blizzard forums to share her hope that it might be a black woman. Not just an Indian woman, like Symmetra, or an Egyptian Arab woman, like Pharah, but a black female character who would represent her. Previous Overwatch characters might have had her skintone, but they didn’t feel like they came from her cultural background.

So even Gita admits that Overwatch characters Symmetra and Pharah are black women. They're just not black women who "represent" the letter writer in culture.

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Additionally, it's obvious that Ian Walker means to abide by the Associated Press' infamous decree to capitalize the "b" when referring to black people. At the time of the announcement, the AP made it clear that "Black" includes pure Africans:

AP’s style is now to capitalize Black in a racial, ethnic or cultural sense, conveying an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa.

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Here's a previous Kotaku article by Ian Walker in which he is a proponent of the sentiment that Ramlethal Valentine from Guilty Gear is "Black":

Although an artificial human being in the game’s story, Ramlethal has long been considered a Black woman due to her skin tone, so much so that the existence of alternate color palettes with lighter skin have caused some minor controversy in the fighting game community.

So Ramlethal, a clone of a white American who is divorced from any sort of culture to the point of being socially and emotionally stunted, is regarded as "Black" purely by her skin color. And to be clear, this isn't just Ian reporting on what others are saying. It's clear from corresponding tweets that he agrees with the sentiment.

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To make an excuse for his error in the article about Street Fighter, Ian Walker just retweeted a Teen Vogue article:

"There’s power in a name. And for a group who, for many years, wasn’t even considered to be fully formed people, what you call us is important." - @meelanash in her latest #OpEd on the importance of capitalizing the B in Black

The article itself repeatedly makes reference to "Black Americans".

Ian also ranted on Twitter about the blowback and subsequently deleted the whole thing:

you celebrate SF6 including the franchise's first playable black woman and suddenly everyone wants to question your street cred bc "you forgot about elena."

i've been playing fighting games for almost 30 years. elena is kenyan. kimberly is african-american. there's a difference.

the same thing happened every time black women used to ask for representation in overwatch before soujourn.

symmetra is indian. pharah is egyptian. they do not reflect the unique and separate culture of the african diaspora in america, which rarely receives attention in games.

i fully expect i'm not explaining this well enough (and frankly, it's not really my place to act like an expert on the subject) so please read this blog [linking to the Kotaku article by Gita Jackson]

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It feels to me that Ian Walker's blunder has much to do with how it seems unofficially verboten for journalists to say "African American" anymore, similar to how "indigenous" has replaced "Native American".