Joelcool7 said:
Theirs a reason their is the Nintendo Seal of Approval, I'm not sure if Microsoft or Sony have similiar seals. But developers should be aloud to develop what ever they want for any platform regardless of the first parties tastes. Example the only reason Wisdom Tree went around Nintendo was because no one would approve of their Bible Games. Today we see only about a single Christian game each generation. It should be like freedom of speech developers should be able to develope freely without fears of getting approval. If the game lacks the Nintendo seal of approval then people know Nintendo did not actually liscence the game, as such Nintendo can't be held liable for the product. Thats good enough for me, companies should have seals of approval letting the consumer know that they did not approve or nescessarily agree with the game's content.
Like at the begging of movies, the screen lights up and say for example "The content of this movie and the views made in this movie are not the views of 21st Century Fox". Their you go now Fox isn't held responsable for the content and the developer is free to express his views as he wants. Freedom to develop products without prejeduce and bias should be a given. But today if Nintendo Sony or Microsoft disagree with your product. Oh well you just have to develop something they agree with. Thats just not right.
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Yes it's a big freedom of speech issue. Since M$, $ony and Nintendo have complete control over what can be developed for their platform (unlike the PC platform, where anything goes.. religious games, porn games, political games, white power video games. lol) thanks to the DMCA laws (which made lockout bypasses illegal now I believe), you can't do anything that is considered controversial on the consoles. One Japanese XNA developer was forced by MS Europe to take down his visual novel game because it didn't the protagonist forcefully pushing down a female character (looking almost as if he was going to rape her). On the PC by contrast, there are Japanese 18+ rated eroges where you can rape women. For it to be illegal to release unlicensed games on consoles is a restriction on freedom of speech. Why is it ok to release a controversial game on a PC but not ok for a console? Only a moron would hold M$, Sony or Nintendo accountable when there is no offcial branding (the Wii, Xbox 360 and Live logos, the PS3 logo. etc) on the games. On the boxart these games say "for use with the Nintendo Entertainment System" or whatever. Right now if I was a indie developer, I'd say that XNA, XBLA and PSN don't look so hot for me. I'd rather work on an open unrestricted platform like the PC where I have the freedom to put as more gore, sexual content and other controversial stuff in my games as I please and don't have to abide by console manufacturer standards.
And you bring up a good example with movies. Movie studios go as far as funding controversial movies but they absolve themselves of responsibility by adding the disclaimer.
