Copyright, free speech, and entertainment lawyers have mixed opinions on the legality of game developer Campo Santo’s decision to fight hate speech with a copyright strike after reaching a breaking point with YouTube celebrity Felix “Pewdiepie” Kjellberg.
A fighting game about world religions on Steam is causing trouble in Malaysia. PQube Games, publisher of the recently released PC game Fight Of Gods, says that the Malaysian government is taking steps to ban the game including blocking access to Steam within the country.
In the heated ongoing conversation over “censorship” in localization, we’ve heard a whole lot from fans and even translators, but we haven’t seen much discussion from Japanese developers. Which is why, when speaking to Tetsuya Takahashi this week in Los Angeles, I asked him for his thoughts on the matter. His answers…
The studio behind the massively successful game World of Tanks walked back their controversial actions against one of their former community YouTubers today.
A prominent World of Tanks YouTuber who is a member of a promotional program for the game had to remove a critical video after developer Wargaming threatened a copyright strike against it.
The Half-Life that was released in Germany in 1998 was a little different. Instead of marines there were robots, and instead of dying horribly the scientists would just kind of sit down and be sad. Well chin up lads, in 2017 Germany’s Half-Life is now as human and violent as everyone else’s.
Yesterday, a localizer for the publisher XSEED took a dramatic stance on what he saw as potential censorship, asking his company to remove his name from the credits of the upcoming JRPG Akiba’s Beat after the developers removed a controversial phrase involving the KKK from the game.
One of the most striking things about Resident Evil 7 is just how gore filled it is. It’s packed with chopped off limbs and sickening body horror. But it seems that the experience is a tamer in Japan.
From bathing suit to Punky Brewster cosplay in one cross-Atlantic trip. Some of the changes made to Japan’s Shin Megami Tensei X Fire Emblem to make it North America’s Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE are quite odd.
As of today, July 1, all mobile games must be pre-approved by the Chinese government at least 20 days before they’re released. It’s part of sweeping new regulations to curb when, what, and how media is distributed in China.
As of this morning, the website Twitch has banned 32 games from appearing on its streaming services. But just what kind of games are they? Let’s take a look.
The twisting controversies about the translation of Nintendo games, harassment, and the firing of one of its employees got even messier this week.
Plenty of games have been touched up and altered as the years went on, but few games have seen as many changes as the original Resident Evil.
When Fire Emblem Fates was released for 3DS in Japan early last summer, it didn’t have a US release date. Within 24 hours, fans were hacking the game and translating it on their own. What started as an experiment became a race to translate the game before Nintendo of America.
The Cut Content Police is a Steam Group with one goal: to warn people about games that have been “in some way censored due to cut, edited, changed, [or] modified content.”
Yandere Simulator is the latest game to get banned from Twitch. If you stream Yandere Simulator, you could get banned, too. Thing is, the developer making the game doesn’t exactly know why Twitch made this call. He’s willing to change some things, if they’d consider lifting the ban, but Twitch isn’t talking to him.
Cassandra Lee Morris voiced Lin Xenoblade Chronicles X, one of the game’s main characters—and a source of controversy. In the US and Europe, the character couldn’t wear certain bikini costumes. On YouTube, she released a video about the process of making the game and weighed in on the “censorship” discussion.
One of Nintendo’s biggest releases in 2015 is the sprawling 100-hour adventure Xenoblade Chronicles X, released earlier this year in Japan. It’s great-looking and fun. That’s not in dispute. The most heated debate about the game—making it the latest flashpoint in ongoing skirmishes over censorship, creative freedom…
It’s been nearly two weeks since a single Facebook comment on the official Dead or Alive page sent people into a tizzy over whether Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 wasn’t coming to the West because of “issues happening in video game industry with regard to how to treat female[s].” Now, publisher Koei Tecmo has responded.
Dan Archer’s Ferguson Firsthand is an educational app about the shooting of Michael Brown. Though it’s not violent, Apple denied it a spot on the App Store. This shouldn’t be a surprise; Apple has treated apps—and, by extension, games—differently for a long time.
