Baseball Stars 2 was released on the Neo Geo in 1992 (one year after the greatest baseball game ever made, with which it has a lot in common), and for the last 28 years has been just fine with teams like the “Tokyo Ninjas” and “Spanish Galleons”. The “Taipei Hawks”, however, have just been removed from a console version of the game following an update earlier this week.
As noted on this Reddit post and this Twitter thread by users, an update for the PS4, Xbox One and Switch version released in 2019 had removed the team names (and country flags) for both the “Taipei Hawks” and the “Taiwan Dragons”, while leaving all the other names like the “Seoul Dragons” in place.
(The game is also available on Steam, but on that version, which is slightly different, none of the teams have place names).
This 2019 console version of the game was ported by Japanese studio Hamster Corporation, but the rights to the game are held by publisher SNK, which in 2015 was purchased by Chinese company 37Games.
At the same time, it appears that another SNK-published title, Art of Fighting 2 on the PC, received a similar update this week, where a depiction of the controversial “Rising Sun” Japanese flag was replaced with a white flag that says “KARATE”:
The edits come a week after the first Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War trailer was edited to remove a reference to the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.