There are a lot of tools that make character development easier, like animation retargeting, various rigging scripts, and modeling and material creation tools. But it's still a tremendous amount of work. I am not a game developer, but I have a lot of experience with 3D character creation in applications like Maya, Marvelous designer, Substance, and UE4. For example, here are some examples from my hobby work from something that I was doing a few years ago:
I made an character that was supposed to be an enemy NPC. This took a lot of hours to make.
Starting from a simple sculpt:
To creating various clothing in Marvelous Designer:
Then the retop, creating the skeleton, skinning:
Then it had to be sliced up, reskinned, and then rigged as individual parts (head, arms, torso, legs, cyber parts) so that you can mix and match in game to create variety:
Then UV mapping all the parts:
Creating the textures and materials:
Putting the character all together and testing:
Then doing motion capture and cleaning it up:
The turning motion capture into animation logic:
With all that said and done, I ended up with tiny bit of variety for one enemy NPC type (four heads, a few cyber parts, a few different types of head gear/hair, a couple pairs of cloths, three punches, and an idle animation. That took so much god damn time and work to do and there is barely much to show. But I show you all that just to tell you that the next character was supposed to be a playable female (never finished her):
Guess how much of the work on the male character was transferable to the female? Aside from being able to retarget animations to her skeleton, none of it. Creating a character is not trivial. Of course a game studio will benefit from efficiencies that I don't have (better pipe line, specialization, custom tools, talent, experience, etc.), but it is still a tremendous amount of work. I show you my hobby quality work just to let you know that I am not making this up...its soooo much work.
Also, if somebody is arguing that animating a female is more difficult than a male, then yeah, I call bullshit too. Animating any character is difficult in a lot of ways that are not obvious. For example, I was working on a cat animation rig. This is the tail rig I made, seems simple, right? Well it wasn't, it was very difficult to make a controller like this and it required a bunch of math and code. It was probably the most difficult thing I've rigged (but that is not really saying much).
I am not trying to make excuses for anybody, but I post all that to show that I have experience doing this and I am not making up how much work this stuff is
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