A bit of a sensationalized headline, considering BioWare was only asked to remove a flag which resembled an LGBT flag in the game. IMO that is a bit different from “removing inclusivity,” which does a lot of heavy lifting. I mean, ignoring that this happens all the time for games sold in the region of Arabia (and maybe also China, but I am not sure about that, though I do know marketing materials are often altered for the CN region to make certain race characters less prominent such as Disney’s Star Wars The Force Awakens making John Boyega less prominent in marketing materials, for example).

Personally, I don’t really see why there would even be any flags at all in a Mass Effect game in the first place. In the original 3 games it seemed that humanity as a whole had advanced beyond the need, desire, or use of flags as representative of people or their identities. I cannot recall any of the first 3 ME games having any, and BioWare made the romance options not care about the gender of the player character. NPCs in the games didn’t seem to care about it, really, so I don’t understand why the flag would have existed in the first place. For the same reason I would wonder why any current country flag would appear in the game either, I just don’t remember any flags at all. Perhaps I am misremembering and just forgot about one somewhere.

To that end, IMO including any flags at all would seem like a regression of human society compared to the first three ME games, unless the cancelled ME took place in a human timeline very close to our current year. It just seemed humanity had advanced beyond the use of flags entirely, which I would imagine most space-faring civilizations would. I am not praising EA here, I am just confused as to why the situation happened in the first place, considering the established lore of the series.