As gaming becomes more mainstream, and the development costs balloon - forcing big budget developers to seek an ever wider audience--games and gaming culture are forced to start considering societal norms and standards. As companies become known to the general public, they are forced to consider what their products are telling the public about them and their ethos. It's an inevitable, fundamental shift, and even if you don't personally view it as a good thing, it shouldn't come as a surprise. I do view it as a good thing in general, although the early steps taken, including this one, are pretty bumbling and inept. Games and gaming culture do have serious issues with underlying currents of pretty vicious sexism, as evidenced by the embarrassing parade of practically weekly debacles lately, and moves like this are the awkward flailing of a homebody dragged out into the light desperately trying to clean themselves up before anyone else sees them looking so disheveled.
As for treating violence against men and women differently, well without defending this particular case (honestly, did we need any particular reason to shake our heads at the blatant wringing of a tired old cash cow long past the point of any real innovation?), violence against men and violence against women do have significantly different connotations, not because of any reality within the game--which might be an immersive imaginary world without millenia long legacies of sexism where men and women might be treated completely equally by the game's idealized fictional society--but rather because the games themselves exist as physical objects within a world where sexism and oppression of women is very much a real thing, both historically and today, around the world and 'here' in wherever 'here' happens to be for you.
