The "must have a male protagonist" thing is to some degree a recent phenomenon. Before the "10 year old screaming on Xbox Live" demographic became a thing, gaming was in a pretty different headspace.
In the year 2000, we had five different FPS games that either starred (Perfect Dark, Medal of Honor: Underground, No-One Lives Forever, Alien: Resurrection) or co-starred (Turok 3) women. In the late 90s, games like Delta Force and Rainbow 6 featured playable female operatives alongside the male ones.
Medal of Honor had no issue making an entire game about a female protagonist. But Call of Duty, its successor, was increasingly aimed at teenage American males, so not only did Call of Duty increasingly become 'MURICA focused, but the series had a playable (male) dog character 4 years before it finally featured a playable female character for a single mission (Call of Duty: WWII in 2017). When Medal of Honor was eventually rebooted, it was in a super gruff manly bearded form.
One game series that strongly demonstrates this rather drastic shift in priorities was Deus Ex. The original Deus Ex was supposed to offer a choice between a male and female lead. (JC Denton was chosen in part because it was gender neutral.) This didn't make the cut for a few reasons. But Deus Ex: Invisible War lefts you choose between male and female Alex Denton.
But then Eidos Montreal rebooted Deus Ex with Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, and the option to play as a female character (with skin tone adjustment) mysteriously evaporated in order to push Adam Jensen as the protagonist.
Look at what happened to Epic. In the original Unreal, the protagonist is female by default, with the option to change it. By the time Gears of War came along, Epic had ended up entangled in a huge amount of dudebro, "no girls allowed" baggage courtesy of their fanbase. 90s Epic would have thought nothing of making a woman the lead character of a Gears of War game. But by the time they were making Gears of War sequels, they were admitting that it was "tough to justify" a female lead. (Which makes The Coalition's choice to pursue a female lead in Gears 5 interesting.)
Similarly, the Alone in the Dark series started out with a male and female lead. The lead developer wanted to try and attract female gamers. He admitted this wasn't particularly successful, granted. However, as the years went on, Alone in the Dark rapidly gravitated towards dark and broody gruff man protagonist tropes. This happened to a lot of series.
As I mentioned, the hottest tactical shooters in the late 90s tended to offer playable female characters. But then something changed and we got a lot of (heavily simplified) games with all-male casts. I always thought it was bizarre how in the original Crysis, you could choose a female nanosuit voice. You were still a male protagonist, but you'd have a female voice for the suit saying, "Maximum strength" and so on. Yet with the Crysis sequels, that suddenly disappeared.
TimeSplitters 2 (2002) featured the (male) protagonist time jumping into the bodies of various male and female characters throughout history. But TImeSplitters 3 (2005) made him the sole protagonist. Across the board there was this shift in gaming away from female characters or even the option to play as female characters, and towards male characters in general. To the point that having a female protagonist was suddenly considered some kind of revolutionary idea by the early 2010s.