Ready or Not Censorship.

[The_Notorious_MSG]

I don't know if anyone actually reads these forums but I'm trying to rally against censorship of games that you have already paid for after the fact. It's in the same camp as the Stop Killing Games movement since it calls out the lack of consumer autonomy when you've already purchased a game.
The developers of Ready or Not promised us a completely uncut experience of what SWAT officers might experience irl and said they would pull no punches.
Now they're pulling punches to sell their game on consoles and they're changing the PC version that everyone already paid for. Games have released different PC and console versions for decades and they're trying to claim that rating boards were what forced them to change the content, despite the fact that they released their game without an ESRB rating and are now trying to change it.
I'm planning on posing this question when Ross does his July videochat Q&A, so I hope a lot of people will help me boost this issue to the forefront.

[Deep Dive Devin]

A developer changing their game of their own volition is definitely not "censorship". I'm not even convinced ratings boards count as "censorship" really, publishers and platform creators deserve to have a say in what they're allowing under their name and on their platform. It affects way more things than most gamers are actually aware of and it's frankly kind of embarrassing that the discussion is usually just centered on a game not being violent, sexual or racist enough for the tastes of people who view the hobby as a pawn in the culture war and not as an art form.

 

To me "censorship" has to involve your work being forcibly altered against your will, and a publisher saying "these are the standards for what we will publish" isn't that. Those developers could theoretically put that game out somewhere else if they felt like it and had the money. Of course, to have the money you're not gonna be self-publishing anyway, but it's at that point where you're essentially arguing that censorship is a product of capitalism itself. Which is true, I'd side with anyone saying that, but gamers on the internet probably wouldn't like the implications of solving that problem.

 

Moreover, SKG is not and has never been about stopping updates that people don't like from happening to games, nor should it be. Developers have a right to update their games, and there's no law that can decide whether an update is good or bad. SKG is about making sure some form of a game is reasonably playable after the point the updates stop. If that happens to not be the best version of that game, it's not gonna be SKG's problem unless the developer is clearly bricking the product on purpose.