Sony is in a bit of a stride recently when it comes to the famed "anime titty" genre, the blocking of Omega Laberynth Z from being released in the west, the removal of an "intimacy" mode in the new Senran Kagura game despite prior games releasing with said feature in the past, and a VNs getting ridiculous censorship on lewd art that is perfectly visible on PC, Xbone and... the Switch of all places, go figure.

https://nichegamer.com/2018/10/27/new-sony-censorship-policy-is-forcing-even-japanese-developers-to-censor-themselves-in-japan/

Now apparently they are making japanese developers apply in some sort of approval process for japan only releases, in english.

Seems like Sony is changing the standards of whats acceptable in their platform, and while I accept that they can do whatever they want and Im not personally a big customer of softcore titles of this nature, this is getting a bit silly.
Reminds me of when Steam started cracking down on adult content, only for GOG to take the opportunity and allow a bunch of Mangamer titles on the store.

This situation is a bit weird, now steam is allowing outright porn games like Evernicle without a second look, Switch is pretty much comfortable with fanservice games being mostly untouched, and Sony is starting to crack down on them for some reason.

How do you guys think this is going to affect japanese releases going forward? are we going to see more japanese developers go for storefronts like Steam and GOG because of policies like this? or will they stick to familiar console territory like the Switch?
Personally Im pretty hardline with my thoughts on censorship, but there is a silver lining since plenty of titles both old and new are getting ported to PC recently, what do you think?

Someone said that "apparently Sony HQ in California is calling the shots now..." which wouldn't make this surprising (as well as the other stuff). Well, fuck Sony.

I never thought the day would come when I consider getting a Nintendo Console (in addition to my PC of course) instead of a Sony one because they don#t censor as much.
Still sounds wierd saying/writing it.

Yeah, this smells a bit of western interference.

From the Gematsu article: https://gematsu.com/2018/10/visual-novel-silverio-trinity-coming-to-playstation-hindered-by-recent-sony-regulations

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[...]
Light representative: “Right now Sony seems to be moving toward disallowing ports of ages 18 and up titles worldwide. And this games is ages 18 and up, so it’s being subjected to a very strict inspection, and we’re getting all these questions. And like ‘Please write everything in English.’ So we’re in the middle of answering those now, and we’re not sure if we’ll get approved or not. It’s terrible, but in any case, development is done.

“So internally it’s complete, but there are things we can’t do without connecting to Sony’s servers, like Trophies. So everyone is like, ‘When will we be able to add Trophies?’

“And we have a guy who is in charge of translating everything into English and sending it to Sony, but it’s like, ‘Don’t you guys understand Japanese?’ At present we’re thinking we can release early next year if it passes Sony’s inspection… And if Sony says no, then I guess we’ll just find somewhere else to put it.”

[…]

Moderator: “So you’re waiting on approval.”

Light representative: “Yeah, waiting for Sony’s approval. If we put it on Steam or wherever, we could be selling it next week. But at the moment we have an agreement with Sony, so… We submitted it with this agreement and yet we’re waiting for approval… Pretty awful, right?”
[...]
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Nintendo could release the Wii U part 2 and it would make money hand over fist because Sony is being stupid.

Wait... isn`t Sony a japanese company? So why do they need english translation, why do they force them to use english instead of japanese?

The foreign branches now have a say on what is released in Japan. Since the foreign branches often can't read in Japanese, the language used should be lingua franca - a trade language. In the modern world this is typically English.

Believe it or not, related, and makes me believe this might not necessarily be western policy.


EDIT:

Disclaimer: At one point i was among a bunch of individuals at a website monitored by the company mentioned in the video, where we stated that the emphasis on titillation causes problems with the fighting game entries being taken seriously in the west.

That said, after the community implemented a "softban," they continued to release titillating outfit DLC (For Dead or Alive 5), while also keeping close tabs on the community (so they knew about the softban, and i think they even commented on how they found that releasing more male characters would further please the west, hence the release of a male character as DLC).

I do wonder why the foreign branches would have a say on japanese releases, are they trying to be family friendly or if is this a consequence of activist types within the company?
Then again western games with adult themes, violence, sex and nudity are not being axed as far as I know, so I suspect the pearl clutching crowd.

It is weird, considering traditionally japan cracks down harder on violence than on sex appeal.

Companies like Sony need to relise adults play games too.

I'll always remeber something Charlie Brooker said "Why the fu***** hell are we made to sit through crap kids games and thats fine, yet the second an adult game arrives (which is ment for adults only) it gets banished then usually censored."

I'm no expert, but i'd imagine it'd either be due to stockholders being foreign and/or something to do with comparisons to western sales. I'd honestly like to hear more, myself, as this is new to me, but if it's true, i'd imagine it'd have to do with either stockholders or issues with western releases being undercut by region lock violations over censorship and/or bad translation. It's not like companies like Nintendo haven't been battling this for a long time, to the point that it's now common to release worldwide at the same time, rather than release a game after seeing how successful it is at home.

So did BleepBl00p.

I'm not a fan of soft porn in my games, so this is no big deal to me, but I can see why people who like looking at digital titties might get upset.

Wow, that's just moronic of them.