Dragon’s Dogma 2, despite catastrophically bad optimization and very negative reviews, has already broken 200k concurrent players on Steam.
Horizon Forbidden West, a purportedly flawless port with very positive reviews, has so far topped out at just over 25k concurrent, roughly half the peak achieved by the first Horizon.
Things can certainly change. Also, Horizon is a two year old game at this point, although still one of the best looking games in existence.
But those numbers are anemic, especially in the wake of Sony’s last PC release (Helldivers 2) hitting almost half a million concurrent players.
Is it possible that the Sweet Baby Inc. story penetrated the mainstream far enough to influence consumer behavior? I’m not aware of any formal connection between HFW and SBI, but it does seem like gamers are becoming more conscious of both the woke taint on AAA and their own ability to avoid it.
Who knows. Maybe it’s just a mirage. A man can dream.
A lot of the time it's probably just Japanese people noticing that American media nowadays is full of blacks regardless of context so they just imitate the trend to appeal to American consumers without thinking about it too hard.
Of course this trend isn't actually indicative of organic consumer demand, but as a Japanese normie you have no idea what's going on and you don't care, so it's easy to make the mistake of seeing a trend and assuming that it's just what all the kids are up to these days.