Indy galge stopped from distribution on Xbox Live
The Japanese indies game Sore demo, watashi wa aishiteiru which was released on Xbox Live has been stopped from distribution.
The author writes on his blog saying that he had originally been contacted by Microsoft Europe that one of the event scenes had content that was deemed inappropriate. The main points highlighted by Microsoft about the scene in question (pictured above) were that:
And the above three points were elements that are visual cues that would remind players of sexual violence, and was deemed to be one of the prohibited content in their indies games.
The author asked if it was possible to keep it in distribution only for the Japan region while they are fixing the scene in question, but were told that in the event that they do not comply and stop distribution, Microsoft will delete it and suspend their account.
Censorship on consoles isn’t new, but the problem faced here is apparently that they have to comply to the content regulations in every region, so if something is okay in the US and Japan but not in Europe, they’ll have to do something to fix it. Whereas the practice with normal console releases is that they would normally only censor the game for the regions that have a problem with it.
