The developer of a game censored due to Nintendo’s content guidelines has apologized to fans and said it that its own disclaimer on the changes should have been more visible.
Last week, fans were shocked to discover that hit superhero game Dispatch had been censored on Nintendo Switch — where enormous black boxes cover nudity and even a character raising their middle finger. While an option to hide these already existed on other platforms, on Switch it is enforced by default, and cannot be toggled off.
Now, after a backlash largely aimed at Nintendo, and questions around why the game has been censored when others (such as The Witcher 3) have not, Dispatch maker AdHoc Studio has released a lengthy statement addressing the situation, apologizing for its own part in it, and promising it was working on changes.
“As Nintendo states, any game that’s going to be on the Nintendo platform needs to ‘meet [Nintendo’s] established content and platform guidelines’,” AdHoc wrote, referring to Nintendo’s own statement on the matter last week.
“This is the key point. Nintendo has content guidelines. Our game didn’t meet those guidelines, so we made changes that would allow us to release on their platform. That’s what happened here. Honestly we thought this would be obvious since we’re the devs that released the fully uncensored version of the game on other platforms.”
In reality, numerous fans had blamed Japanese rating board CERO for the censorship, as it is widely believed to be the reason why an entirely separate Japan-only version of Cyberpunk 2077 exists for Nintendo Switch without nudity or beheading, even though an uncensored version was released for the platform everywhere else in the world.
“We initially assumed, like some of you, that because games like Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk are on the platform with similar types of uncensored mature content, Dispatch would be allowed to do the same,” AdHoc continued. “During the porting process it became clear that was not the case. So we asked that we include a disclaimer on the store page to inform customers that content would be different than on other platforms. We worked with Nintendo to get storefront language approved.
“Where we absolutely need to take full ownership is the placement of that disclaimer. Again, it was our intent to go out of our way to tell people looking to buy the game that the content was censored. While we didn’t have complete control of the language, we did have control of the placement. Wires got crossed and we put the disclaimer in the field literally titled ‘Disclaimer’, instead of the ‘About The Game’ section. We didn’t catch this until after the launch when we saw people saying we should have called out the changes on the store page, and we went to go make sure it was there. It technically has been the entire time, just in the absolute worst spot that makes it look like we were trying to hide it.
“This is 100% our mistake and it was fixed in the Americas store pages a few hours after launch to give more visibility,” AdHoc admited. “We’ve also added a disclaimer before purchase. As of writing this, the other regions have either published this change or are in the process of review.”
In short, then, AdHoc says it was Nintendo that required the censorship, though it should have done a better job at ensuring fans were better warned about it. Exactly why the game has censored nudity when other games do not, however, remains a mystery. Did Nintendo see a comic book-style game with superheroes and think there was a greater risk of kids seeing nudity than in The Witcher, an RPG where slaying monsters in bloody combat? Neither Nintendo or AdHoc has elaborated.
On the upside, and seemingly as a result of all this drama, changes sound like they’ll come to Dispatch in the future that may ease the censorship somewhat.
“We’re already working with Nintendo on a path forward,” AdHoc concluded. “While we can’t make any specific promises just yet, we’re confident we’ll be able to push an update to address at least some of the censored content. I’ll get ahead of it now and say that between dev time and the console submission process, we’re talking weeks not days.
“To our fans who were looking forward to playing the uncensored version on Switch, we’re truly sorry. People have a right to be pissed. Lots of lessons learned here. Thanks for sticking with us. More soon.”
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
feedzy_import_tag feedzy_import_tag
About the Author
