• If you're here for vtubers, I highly recommend you go to The Virtual Asylum instead.
    They'll love you there

Sony Censorship

Zurathetix

varishangout.com
Regular
Ok a bit of a recap to what actually happened with Sony Playstation, SIE (Sony Interactive Entertainment) the branch which deals with playstation exclusively moved its headquarters to California. Every console has a "game approval" process where you have to send your game to the platform holders and they do a quality assurance testing of sorts. In theory it has less to do with content and more with if the game is running in an acceptable state on the platform as an example, historically it had very little to do with contents of the game itself. The game approval commitee (or whatever) moved to California along with SIE and so developers had to send in their games to sony california to get approved. This is where the global standards thing came in as the game approval team started asking for various elements of game content to be removed or altered (even for japan only releases not worldwide/localized) for them to be in line with "global standards". The japanese division quietly accepted this because the top positions of the playstation heirarchy is mostly western including the president himself. Sony Corporation might still be japanese but they leave SIE (american) to their devices as long as they continue to bring in money and lets be real money lost due to censorship of ecchi games is miniscule in the grand scheme of things so everyone just went along with it without fighting back.



*I would assume the same for xbox game approval given the recent Gal Gun fiasco. Nintendo's game approval team on the other hand is either in Japan or regional approval teams cannot force changes (unless technical), the current president of Nintendo has also said on record that they will not force changes if the content has been rated by the rating boards of respective countries, so 3rd parties can get away with it (Rating boards like PEGI and ESRB are actually surprisingly lenient given the state of the clown world) . First party games however cannot because NOA/NOE (america,europe) handles localization and things get dumbed down or censored in that process. We all know what steam is like and based on past examples it seems like whether a game gets approved or not solely depends on who is judging it as they dont have guidelines (not that I am aware of).



The earliest known example of sony's new policy we got was second half of 2018 from silverio trinity producers complained about it on a niconico livestream. This is also where we have concrete proof of devs saying that they have to go through approval of the US branch even for games that are meant for japanese audiences. Various other actual censorship got spotted after that and the rest is history.



Some aspects of ecchi games that are the most prone to getting sony banned are

1. CGs with partial nudity* (because of this one big Japanese Console VN publisher just censor even pantyshots from in their VNs)

2. Anything related to touch features, for example Senran Kagura touching or stuff like Omega Labyrinth, Mary Skelter, Moero Chronicles/Crystals rubbing.

As a fan of ecchi games and owner of all playstations upto ps4 this hit me hard to the point that I seethe about this everyday. Ecchi games are now a dying breed because apart from 3-4 devs everyone just gave up and goes along with these "global standards". Great example would be my (ex) favourite ecchi dev Compile Heart still licking sony boots with the new Nep X Senran (my most favourite ecchi ip) game recently (it will be 100% self censored and not even close to Senran greatness).

Mary Skelter Finale (also Compile Heart) is about to be released this year in the west and you will see that they completely removed the rubbing function which from the first two games, the game even got a lower rating from the first two (CERO D) to CERO C. There was some drama regarding Mary Skelter 2 (will provide links and talk about it if anyone wants) which lead to this decision.

Anyway I think theres a lot of misinformation regarding Sony censorship and console game censorship in general so I felt like making this thread. I can provide links for my claims if anyone wants but a simple google search should be enough.

I'll add a few links because wth I'm bored. Here are some recent examples from Entergram one of bigger console VN publishers in Japan.

Archives of tweets by uitachibana (as far as I know he was one of the first on jp twitter to call out and show examples of sony censorship, his screenshots are still used today by people as examples)


EljERqUVoAE_g9m.jpg

EljER48UcAAr-Zb.jpg

EljE2i3U4AA0s0C.jpg
EljE2wDU8AAZCR0.jpg


EljNnU3VkAAwV5B.jpg


EljNnhwVMAUuAq3.jpg
EljNny4VcAAZPb7.jpg
EljNoC4VkAAT_wv.jpg
EvM7ZNoVIAI7C8H.jpg
EvM7Y9aVEAMrXzY.jpg
EvM7ZreVoAIKVuI.jpg
EvM7Zb1UYAQ63Eh.jpg



As you can see its not even sex scenes that get censored for consoles anyways (partial nudity is still used in console by devs who dont follow this "global standard" , its just regular ones (panties, bikinis).

and heres a tweet from the same guy saying how this global standards shit has affected console vns, that is most devs just follow plays along with sony policies.




You can go like well yeah console vns were always shit, but thats not the point, the point is how this has changed how things were before and how ecchi games (non pornographic) as a whole is a dying breed because of these standards and the jp devs unwillingness to fight back. None of these vns were released for any other region than japan mind you. Forcing "global standards" even when these things are only for japan.
I have more links I may post more when Im bored or something.
 
Last edited:

Halo

varishangout.com
Regular
I'll add a few links because wth I'm bored. Here are some recent examples from Entergram one of bigger console VN publishers in Japan.


As you can see its not even sex scenes that get censored for consoles anyways (partial nudity is still used in console by devs who dont follow this "global standard" , its just regular ones (panties, bikinis).

and heres a tweet from the same guy saying how this global standards shit has affected console vns, that is most devs just follow plays along with sony policies. You can go like well yeah console vns were always shit, but thats not the point, the point is how this has changed how things were before and how ecchi games (non pornographic) as a whole is a dying breed because of these standards and the jp devs unwillingness to fight back. None of these vns were released for any other region than japan mind you. Forcing "global standards" even when these things are only for japan.


I have more links I may post more when Im bored or something.
archive.
 

Dynasty11

varishangout.com
With Sony doing that, I've been mostly buying ecchi games on the Nintendo Switch. And just buying retro Playstation games dating back to PS1-PS3.
 

Zurathetix

varishangout.com
Regular
With Sony doing that, I've been mostly buying ecchi games on the Nintendo Switch. And just buying retro Playstation games dating back to PS1-PS3.
Yea same here, atleast whats left of the couple of surviving ecchi games anyways. I sperged so much that I stopped buying games on playstation ever since and haven't touched it. The big problem is Mary Skelter Finale as an example got self censored and functions removed from the game as a whole (i.e both platforms). When you see ecchi legends like Compile Heart rather self censor than fight back you know things are not looking good at all.
 

Dynasty11

varishangout.com
Yea same here, atleast whats left of the couple of surviving ecchi games anyways. I sperged so much that I stopped buying games on playstation ever since and haven't touched it. The big problem is Mary Skelter Finale as an example got self censored and functions removed from the game as a whole (i.e both platforms). When you see ecchi legends like Compile Heart rather self censor than fight back you know things are not looking good at all.
Mary Skelter got censored? The first one, second one, or both games? Because I don't want to play those games that are censored.

Mary Skelter got censored? The first one, second one, or both games? Because I don't want to play those games that are censored.
Oh. The new game Finale. The third game. Not sure about the first and second game though.
 

Zurathetix

varishangout.com
Regular
Oh. The new game Finale. The third game. Not sure about the first and second game though.
The third one Finale already released in japan, about to be released worldwide later this year, got censored yeah. Both 1 and 2 are fine and available on the switch (1 is actually included with Mary Skelter 2 so its a two in one type of deal). Mary Skelter 2 is on switch only for the west despite releasing in ps4 too in japan (sony policies were not enforced during that time but started during when it was released for the west so they skipped releasing it on playstation for the west). There was a bit of "drama" with Mary Skelter 2 and it paints the picture of sony enforcing rules, I'll write about it later when I'm bored.
 

immahnoob

varishangout.com
Regular
Patron of the Forums
We shouldn't forget that they're also devs are self-censoring or pre-censoring for Japan as well because of Sony.
Sony also came out to talk in defense of feminism and against the "sexualization" of women, it was a quote more specific towards Anime content.
I've also heard that the American branch is pretty much the main branch now, but I'm not sure if that's true or not.
 

PhantomXero1x

varishangout.com
Regular
Apparently not even Japanese people are really happy about the decision and also other buisness choices of sony like for example re-aranging the button schemes for the ps5 controller. And now Nintendo and Microsoft, are dominating the console wars in Japan.

Even pc gaming is groing really rapidly in Japan too.
 

Narbray

varishangout.com
Regular
this is sad, very sad, we really should stop buying these games like this, but it's no use if they don't have a considerable loss from them, maybe we should make a move to motivate people not to buy these games like this and that the company open your eyes, after all most consumers disagree with these policies and surely the losses would be very high, so they would realize who really buys their games would leave this stupidity a bit [I hope] but the question is :
who would take the first step and spend the work of promoting these things on social networks so that everyone opens their eyes a little.
Seriously, it looks bad, one thing is the assholes of twitter and the little crystals who do not know how to activate the filter for +18 and become victims later. But when companies like these are the ones that promote this censorship at these levels, things already look very bad, we have to remove the monopoly cloud in which they are mounted.
The governments are not going to give a damn and things could get bad if they start to pass laws to favor this, while Japan and the United States recite, we will be partially fine ... but how long will that resistance last?
 

nitwitsworld

varishangout.com
this is sad, very sad, we really should stop buying these games like this, but it's no use if they don't have a considerable loss from them, maybe we should make a move to motivate people not to buy these games like this and that the company open your eyes, after all most consumers disagree with these policies and surely the losses would be very high, so they would realize who really buys their games would leave this stupidity a bit [I hope] but the question is :
who would take the first step and spend the work of promoting these things on social networks so that everyone opens their eyes a little.
Seriously, it looks bad, one thing is the assholes of twitter and the little crystals who do not know how to activate the filter for +18 and become victims later. But when companies like these are the ones that promote this censorship at these levels, things already look very bad, we have to remove the monopoly cloud in which they are mounted.
The governments are not going to give a damn and things could get bad if they start to pass laws to favor this, while Japan and the United States recite, we will be partially fine ... but how long will that resistance last?
shit gets worse when you censor sexy ladies. We have to mod games to bring back sexiness again
 

Tamamo

varishangout.com
Regular
There was a unique case with Ar nosurge DX recently where the PS4 and Switch versions were uncensored while the PC version was censored. Thanks Gabe.

030815.PNG
 
Top