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RE: Thoughts on the Censorship by Sony USA, and What That Means for my Reviews Going Forward.
I'm not a fan of censorship but I imagine they are doing this for business reasons. They believe, rightly or wrongly, that they will ultimately have a better brand image and make more profit by censoring stuff like this. Sony is only going to support "artistic creativity" when they feel it is in their business interest to do so.
I find it harder and harder to accept it's purely done for business reasons.
Their main competition right now is the Nintendo Switch, who is getting praised for cutting back on their past censorship shenanigans and succeeding immenslely as a family friendly console as well, plus the same issues aren't hitting western releases nearly as much as games coming over from Japan.
I think the decision is a lot more idealogical in nature. I didn't really talk about in the article proper as this is mostly speculation, but I don't think the headquarters moving to San Fransisco and the sudden crack down on censorship is at all a coincidence.
What would San Francisco have to do with it? I wouldn't expect censorship, at least of that kind, out of San Francisco. But I don't know enough about the ideology of those running things to say whether that's the issue or not. Was what they have been censoring likely to have changed the ESRB rating of the game? If it brings a game from Adults only to Mature or from Mature to Teen then I would think that could be a big motivation. If not, then yeah, I don't really see the point and maybe it is just ideological...
I'm not sure how familiar you are with the American ideological/Political stuff, but the majority of the tech industry here is located in California, specifically a place called Silicon Valley in San Fransisco.
California as a largely left leaning state, and is also home to a lot or your more extreme ideologies. You see similar trends to what you see Sony now doing as you see with other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. You end up in this weird echo chamber, which regardless of your beliefs is always a dangerous thing to happen.
When Sony moves headquarters to San Fransisco, and their policies begin to fall in line with all other San Fransisco based companies, it's hard to say the ideology isn't a factor.
And considering DmC V is a Mature rating across all platforms, it's hard to believe it's because they wanted a lower rating, as that doesn't change.
Oh, I'm quite familiar with the political stuff and I don't think any amount of money would be enough to get me to move to California. I just don't see how it applies in this case. I would expect this particular sort of censorship from the far right, not the far left, at least for reasons of ideology. I mean the far right might censor it on religious and/or moral grounds by why would the far left?
Being a big anime fan myself, it's easy to see this kind of thing coming from the left side of politics. It's something they have been doing with anime for a while now, as well as various games that have been censored by companies with a far left Bias (Nintendo Treehouse was absolutely horrible about this, the politics of one of it's localizers was very far left, and she was one of the ones involved in the Fire Emblem nonsense where an entire minigame was cut out of the game because they felt it inappropriate). Not the general left leaning populace, but the really far left have been going after scantily clad women in games and anime for some time, demanding less lewd characters.
It's that very uncomfortable crossroads where the far left and the far right seem to meet at common ground, anime titties are bad and need covered up.