SHIFT UP Quietly Reintroduces Uncensored Outfits Into Stellar Blade's Latest Update - Techopse - Trading Enthusiasm for Anger
Well, I’m amazed. A massive social media campaign involving tens of thousands of users, without review bombing or demanding refunds, has resulted in a monumental win for gamers. Korean developers SHIFT UP have quietly included two of the uncensored outfits...
I might be accused of purity testing, but I feel like this is sneaky, you can't play both sides and everyone I mean everyone hates the leftists so these idiots need to stop pandering to them. Take the wins while we can get them I guess? The fact they even did this at all means the public pressure on them over silly censorship moves is real but if they had just left the game alone they wouldn't have this problem.
The primary goal forget censorship, forget business practices, is to make it extremely punishing for them to take government money because at the end of the day that's what is driving this. It's the ESG/DEI shit combined with glowie pressure to spy on their own customers, they think they can get away with it and still have enough sales left over even if they lose a chunk of their audience. This is calculated or alternatively they're just running the company in the ground for the sake of padding their own bank accounts.
Its not even purity testing.
They left their "real fans" out to dry and get harassed, mocked, and shit on for "losing" for weeks until the game left the news cycle. Now they go back and try to appease them once there is no longer any consequence to doing so, as the narratives have moved on from caring what they do.
Its the most cowardly form of appeasement. They bent the knee and let the anti-censorship side take all the hits for them (and collected the handful of profits off the pro-side buying to stick it to the chuds), then quietly gave them a pity handjob in the back later.
The only way this is a "win" is if you only cared about jerking off. On any of the actual stances about the industry and principles this is still a loss.
A strange thing happens when you slum it in the indie PC gaming pool for a few fears: suddenly you have negative interest in AAA gaming. I used to buy half a dozen AAA games a year, but now that number is down to maybe one. I can’t even fathom spending my free time playing a modern AAA game (outside of From Soft). Shallow boring gameplay buried beneath intrusive shit storytelling for $60-70? Fuck off.
I have a PC so I'm not having deal deal with any console stuff lol.
If you can't take a concession and a win you'll never gain any ground.
Yeah, that's fair, at the same time though to counter that we've seen how they'll sneak this crap in or they'll put the horni behind a paywall as a way of getting around it. I guess I'm too used to them trying to pull something after they've made a statement.
If it were paid dlc and not a free patch yeah. But the fact that the censorship itself was so last minute that the it came after the uncensored version was approved and disks manufactured leans toward it Sony being little shits. Nikke is still fanservice: the game (and launching a character with a literal naked skin the day prior to Stellar Blade's launch) so I doubt it's Shift Up's corporate culture that censored that. Between this and Helldivers Sony really ate crow and had to correct course fast.