Why is censorship still a thing..? Especially in US?

[binary solo]

You are getting totally the wrong end of the stick. Nintendo is doing this to themselves it's not being forced on them by anyone. Nintendo is free to ruin it's own work and while you are free to call Nintendo a bunch of dicks for doing it, Nintendo is merely exercising its rights do change and modify it's games as it sees fit.

This is not the kind of censorship you should be getting all hot and bothered about. Try focussing on the actually socially damaging forms of censorship like that which is imposed by an overbearing government, such as Australia. Or countries that block access to political or activist websites, or the banning of books, or the oppression of the media. Nintendo nerfing their own games is a non-issue.

Although, it is an issue if these decisions end up hurting the sales of the games and/or having a negative impact on hardware sales. Though at this point, it's hard to think Wii U hardware sales could get worse from these sorts of decisions. At worst the games won't increase hardware sales, but I doubt if these games were released in their original form they would do much for hardware sales anyway.If Nintendo wants their next console to have a much broader base of gamer support then they need to release these games without nerfing content. These decisions merely play into the perception that they are positining themselves as kid / family friendly in the west and therefore don't adequately cater to the interest of the generality of gamers. Whether that is right or wrong, these game nerfing actions just feed into that perception.