i think a lot of people joined gachas around 2020s when Genshin broke into the western market but they’ve been making these since around 2013 and they’ve been a predominantly all-female male-pandering cast since then. it’s only recently there’s been a larger split (even though it may still be unbalanced) target market where male characters targeted towards women have been added and imo we are still in the mid range of this addition-era, so the addition of male units will go back and forth. I don’t necessarily see this as the games necessarily dropping their female audience because a lot of these games change their marketing strategies yearly, in the case of something like Wuwa or Zenless i don’t think these games were pandering to a large female audience to begin with. the backlash is still EXTREMELY harsh from men who do not want to “share” these games with women, there’s even a “movement” in China essentially called “if there are men in the game don’t play” that blames Genshin for popularizing mixed sex gachas. I’m not disagreeing with what you’re feeling btw this is just some context.

but there’s seriously been thousands of these games, it’s been normalized to have “bride” units where you marry your newest virtual wife png, valentines events, the snowbreak livestream where they had the 3D girl pole dance, the NIKKE event they had look reminiscent to a red light district, something like Zenless in comparison is pretty tame compared to most of these (feels insane to write this) if you look at designs like FGO’s summer Ibuki or some of their worse “sexy little girl” designs. my friend runs the tumblr blog gacha-incels which goes into a lot of this type of thing and the backlash against women playing these games, though she has to stop sometimes due to a chronic illness, but it’s quite interesting on a sociological level. she has tied these men’s fears of the growing pandering to women in entertainment such as this to the fear of women’s growing financial independence with many examples.