I dunno if it is so much rarer to have female protags nowadays, esp. in modern games, as one would be led to believe. I see games released with female mc (or option to play as one) regularly at least, esp. within the indie scene. The ratio is different for older/classics games though for sure, no argument there. I just find the tag funny, it doesn't really have any value to me personally and feels like it is there just to try and sell itself for a fact of having the female mc, as a form of cheap marketing of sorts. I wonder if there are people who actively seek or avoid playing games with a particular gender mc. Seems silly to me, but whatever. Different strokes for different folks I guess.

Don't have any detailed statistics or reports, but on Steam alone there is 7500 games with "Female protagonist" tag, so doesn't seem as such a niche. I reckon that the other games have either male protagonist only, both m/f or it's redundant as you don't play as mankind or it's irrelevant for some genres. Anyway, I wonder if the ratio comes close to 1:1 if we would ever see an end of such gender tags, or even see the male protag tag at some point. I know i would have a good laugh if we ever come the full circle.

Btw one of the earliest games I clearly remember playing as a kid with female protag was Athena. Loved it back then, though I didn't even pay attention to that mc is a girlie (arguably, it was just a matter of a couple pixels back then). However I remember seeing a cool poster of her, though I doubt it was the driving force for me to play the game. Today pretty much any new game contains a waifu of some sort though.