makes no significant difference to me, personally, as i don't really feel like i'm living vicariously through the character i'm playing as much as merely manipulating them in order to progress in the game.
also, i prefer to play as female in a lot of 3rd person games because if i'm going to be staring at them for several hours, i'd rather be staring at something i find attarctive.
Yes absolutely. It's one of the first tags I look for before downloading a game. The only time I tried otherwise was with "harvesting corruption," but only because it had the option to switch to male mc; the option is gone now. Can't say I didn't enjoy the game tho.
For fairly linear stories, I prefer Male MCs. For the LC "Core Content", only Male MCs.
For sandbox/adventure stuff, I like Female MCs. My FemMC Holy Grail would be sandbox rpg with dress up, point-by-point interactions with NPCs, bestialty, mostly voluntary corruption/pervertion system, SHOPPING!, upgradable challenges, crap like that. In other words: Games that drive Devs straight to therapy. Raven's Quest, Third Crisis, A Town of Magic, Lustdoll+ were almost perfect, but I'm THAT picky, so they suck.
tl;dr Males for lunear harem stuff, Females for dippy broad adventures.
I usually do not identify too deeply with the MC, so it gender does not really matter much.
Though, most of the games i played have a male MC, but i also can enjoy female MCs.
I very much like Anna's Exciting Affection and The Office Wife,
and even played Skyrim with a female MC halfway through...