(this is a reply to https://twitter.com/hownottodraw/status/892655179509764096)
Okay, so: I think the situation with girls games in the 90s came pretty directly out of them being sold as a weird form of toys (as opposed to games for boys, which were their own thriving market with a specialist press etc). This doesn't apply everywhere, but I think it does apply to the Barbie games especially - if only because they were published / licensed by Mattel.
(I also do think there were other factors at play - many people at publishers and developers were probably sexist, and working on girls games was no doubt seen as low status for both publishers and devs. None of that helped)
I'm also kinda shading between toys as they are now and toys as they were 20 years ago. I actually don't really know what the toy market was like in the 90s, but I heavily suspect it has not changed all that fundamentally. (I should also point out I'm not an expert in the current toy market, but I have been exposed to it as we talk about how to market and sell Beasts of Balance. And also I'm not an expert on the games market in the 90s, either!)
Toys at the moment are really really gender segregated. Which is kind of obvious to say, but it's very striking. Literal blue aisles and pink aisles. I don't think girls are necessarily discriminated against in terms of quality, but they are definitely separate, and very stereotyped.
The toy business is also conservative. Because you actually have to manufacture shit (and to state the obvious, this applied to all 90s games), you have to invest capital and deal with lead times when ordering - and this means most toys come out of one of about 3 huge companies. And they have layers of management, and are hugely risk averse, and take a long time to chew up interesting ideas before spitting them up, kinda mangled (sidenote: it is WILD that Risk: Legacy came out of Hasbro). On top of this, in order to sell to kids, you have to sell retail stores on your toys - and retail buyers go on "what sold before".
And there's not really a critical ecosystem around toys. There's some buyers guides, there's some stuff in mainstream papers - but there's not the same conversation you have about videogames, where innovation is praised and people really dig in.
So, for the 90s Barbie games? They were sold like toys, so they were kind of crap in the ways toys are. But the boys games got a critical ecosystem in the video game press (actively hostile to Barbie games) - giving publishers an incentive towards quality . The boys games got more prominent positioning in the places that sold videogames. And the gender segregation meant that challenging this would be an uphill battle every way. So you got shovelware budgets, shonky games, and a bad repuation for "girl's games". All of which is a sexist outcome of a sexist system - but none of which needs people to think girls are stupid. Although I'm sure there was some of that, too.
(But also, as Rachel Simone Weil demonstrates so well with Femicom Museum - there's also some really cool stuff there that demonstrates that at least some of these games were made by at least some people that really cared for them - and for the girls who would play them)
(And also! This is not all of girl's games in the 90s - look at Theresa Duncan as a counter-example of someone who broke through this paradigm)
And finally, on a happy note: toys do now seem to be changing! Spin-Master (huge toy manufacturer) recently bought Toca Boca, which is already bearing fruit in a range of gender neutral clothing at Target. There's a wider push against gender segregation, both in stores and in product lines (the re-ascendancy of Lego has probably helped a bunch). E-commerce is now obviously huge - and Amazon does not worry about feet of shelf-space in the way that Toys'R'Us does. And: I work at a startup that has successfully manufactured and is selling a toy. It feels increasingly the case that you're not reliant on the big companies buying up your idea and then one day deciding to actually make it.