Following an official response from Nintendo yesterday about the censorship in the Switch versions of Dispatch, the developer AdHoc Studio has now shared a lengthy statement.
In this update, which follows a comment it made to Nintendo Life earlier this week, the studio explains how the superhero workplace comedy game didn’t meet Nintendo’s content guidelines.
Apart from this, the good news is that the team is already supposedly working with Nintendo on a path forward to “address at least some of the censored content”. It can’t make any specific promises, but fans can apparently expect an update in the future.
Here’s the full statement from AdHoc:
We’ve been quiet for the last few days not because we don’t want to address this stuff, but because we’ve been trying to make sure we’re being good partners with Nintendo. They’ve made their own statement regarding this issue:
“Nintendo requires all games on its platforms to receive ratings from independent organizations and to meet our established content and platform guidelines. While we inform partners when their titles don’t meet our guidelines, Nintendo does not make changes to partner content. We also do not discuss specific content or the criteria used in making these determinations.”
As Nintendo states, any game that’s going to be on the Nintendo platform needs to ‘meet [Nintendo’s] established content and platform guidelines.’ This is the key point. Nintendo has content guidelines. Our game didn’t meet those guidelines, so we made changes that would allow us to release on their platform. That’s what happened here. Honestly we thought this would be obvious since we’re the devs that released the fully uncensored version of the game on other platforms.
We initially assumed, like some of you, that because games like Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk are on the platform with similar types of uncensored mature content, Dispatch would be allowed to do the same. During the porting process it became clear that was not the case. So we asked that we include a disclaimer on the store page to inform customers that content would be different than on other platforms. We worked with Nintendo to get storefront language approved.
Where we absolutely need to take full ownership is the placement of that disclaimer. Again, it was our intent to go out of our way to tell people looking to buy the game that the content was censored. While we didn’t have complete control of the language, we did have control of the placement. Wires got crossed and we put the disclaimer in the field literally titled “Disclaimer”, instead of the “About The Game” section. We didn’t catch this until after the launch when we saw people saying we should have called out the changes on the store page, and we went to go make sure it was there. It technically has been the entire time, just in the absolute worst spot that makes it look like we were trying to hide it.
This is 100% our mistake and it was fixed in the Americas store pages a few hours after launch to give more visibility. We’ve also added a disclaimer before purchase. As of writing this, the other regions have either published this change or are in the process of review.
So what now?
We’re already working with Nintendo on a path forward. While we can’t make any specific promises just yet, we’re confident we’ll be able to push an update to address at least some of the censored content. I’ll get ahead of it now and say that between dev time and the console submission process, we’re talking weeks not days.
To our fans who were looking forward to playing the uncensored version on Switch, we’re truly sorry. People have a right to be pissed. Lots of lessons learned here. Thanks for sticking with us. More soon.
