The Social Justice Warriors are back at it again

Whether it’s removing iconic emotes from established characters in a franchise or replacing humans with robots, the SJW movement (aka Social Justice Warriors) is rising to extremes when it comes to censoring ‘offensive’ material. 

When political correctness hit the scene, many games fell under its crosshairs. Sometimes removing material that clearly tries to convey a racist or otherwise actually offensive message from its developers isn’t really a bad thing, but unfortunately, the censorship police that emerged because of this is now targeting everything that they consider offensive. 

This can range from a simple slap on the behind, to making a game completely unavailable in a country because it is deemed too violent, which was, among others, the case with GTA V in Australia, where it is banned.

Witcher 3: Wild Hunt also received significant censorship in Japan and the Middle East, because of its nude scenes. 

Taking it to the extreme

The problem with censoring game content is that it alienates a lot of the playerbase that the game tries to cater to. Extreme censorship might even prevent sales in a country, and that might cost the company potential millions of dollars in possible revenue. 

And putting money aside, the games that do get toned down by censorship serve only to appease a minor group of people whilst alienating the rest of them. Grand Theft Auto V, the most successful GTA to date is completely banned in Australia as it supposedly promotes violence against women while in fact the game only tries to display a sense of realism and freedom of the player to do what he wants.

The Witcher 3 CENSORED - Violence Reduced

Removing the entrails whilst still leaving a bloddy corpse sown in half, is pretty much the same level of violence.

That’s what ratings are for

If a game is rated M, that should serve as a guideline for parents and players to know what kind of content to expect when they buy the game.

Certain games have a certain theme and lore and a part of that theme can be violence. If a certain fanbase that the franchise created through its games gets a reduced, watered down version of the game, that only results in a diminished playerbase. 

If splattering an alien’s head in Half-Life is not your thing, then a reduced version with no blood and an absence of realism only serves to give a large group of people half of the actual experience, and that shouldn’t be a thing, as everyone should decide for themselves if they can handle the level of realism or violence in a game or not. If you can’t, just don’t buy it.

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