Archive of previous thread: https://archive.ph/K9xml
The purpose of this thread is to document and discuss Nintendo's recent actions towards censoring third-party games released on their platforms. As in, games that Nintendo has demanded that companies alter despite having no participation in any step regarding the game's development and release. This point on the subject needs to be emphasized because of two reasons.
The first is that people try to deflect such censorship practices for the purposes of so-called "regional differences", such as different regional laws and restrictions on game releases. This is not that issue as these are games that may have been released previously in the region sometime in the past decade or two, or the game is still being released unaltered on a competing platform like PlayStation or Xbox that still follows the same restrictions and/or even has their own. Second is that, despite censoring their own games, Nintendo actually has a history of leaving third-parties alone regarding what content is allowed to be inserted into their games, a topic I will be getting into in the following post. Regardless, if you JUST want a list of “all” instances of games being censored on the Nintendo Switch (And the upcoming Switch 2) regardless of reason, I suggest that you look at these two following links:
https://archive.ph/S0pfk
https://archive.ph/oaP9T
But why make this an issue? Back in 2019, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa made the following declaration in response to a question about restricting content present in video games released on Nintendo’s systems: https://archive.ph/RkxJm
>Q11: Regarding restrictions on expression. Some other platforms have their own restrictions other than third-party organizations such as CERO. How about Nintendo?
<A11: Nintendo entrusts a third-party organization with the task of providing objective ratings for its own products and third-party software prior to its release. If the platform operator arbitrarily chooses to do so, it would seriously impede the diversity and fairness of game software. The parental control function also allows for restrictions to be put in place.
In addition to this statement, Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser recently made the following statement less than a week ago: https://archive.ph/nrYHD
<We always want to attract the best talent we can and retain that talent. We also believe it’s important for that talent to be diverse in terms of their backgrounds, their experiences, and their understandings because our players are diverse. So we strive to have diversity that reflects our players in our organization.
In some ways, it mirrors a similar statement that Sony had made back in 2018 when they were in the middle of their own scandal for censoring games released on PlayStation: https://archive.ph/X2wGz
There are also indications that this is an official policy coming down from Nintendo proper in Japan, based both of the list that you’ll see below (That includes Japanese exclusives and Japanese versions games being effected) and other people researching into the matter confirming details with other industry insiders: https://archive.is/ApYH8#post-1477584