The lead developer of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows is in Quebec. And does it not matter that it’s based on a historical figure? Consider also that in California, you’re just more likely to encounter a diverse group of people, so wouldn’t that just be representing the world around them?
If you want to talk about an honest discussion, consider the sample set you plugged into your search. You didn’t go through two years of articles on VGC or GameSpot. You plugged indiscriminate search criteria into an AI. We just had a discussion a few days ago about how mainstream media is not covering major gaming news, but if you’re reading gaming news outlets, it’s been layoffs for the past two years dominating the news. Gaming news outlets would have very little reason to ever use the word “hunger”, for instance, and “transgender” would apply to far more articles than those about fictional characters.
Not just in games, but often times the point of the story’s fake politics is to be a parable for real politics. But that’s also the fun of it, even if you disagree with the story’s intended message.
It’s extremely rare for a delisted game to be removed from your library, and they only do it in cases where, for instance, the game would literally be unplayable because the server isn’t there anymore. Often times they won’t remove the game from your library in that situation either. Having the game in your library is, in fact, enough.
Death Stranding is one of my favorite examples of how many ideas are out there to make games out of without resorting to making a game loop revolve around violence.
I don’t think this game is AAA or that they sunk much money into it. From what I can tell, they just fell $100M short of very optimistic revenue projections based on high initial player numbers.