I have yet to see many new releases game with a tiny black bar, they typically cover up the important bits and are far from small, and from what I've seen they are tied to the image typically making it impossible to remove, while a decent portion of overlay traditional censors have work arounds. Comics maybe a different story because its much easier to just ad a black line but we are talking about games. Also, Rus is making mosaic removals for people abroad. Rus made the decision to uncensor because many international buyers requested it(me included). His original games were only through DLsite or other Japanese sites and the first one he put on Steam was taken down not to far after. He has a new publisher that is permitted to share uncensored patches from what I've come to understand.
I feel like artists want to sell uncensored content but laws prevent it(clearly), why would someone want to "hide" their artistic talents that they are selling other than fear of prosecution? I speculate that it requires certain publishers and most probably don't offer as good compensation to the artists as lets say DLsite while also increasing their workload.
It's not 'laws,' it's just Japan. Just. Japan. And the law was originally in response to the US, which is the ironically funny part. Still comes off to me as one of the most backward things ever in 2025, and one of the most contradictory ones too, but whatever, Japanese gaming has long known to be stuck 100 years behind everyone else which is also why they lost the global market and dropped from number 1 producer and consumer of video games to like 4th or 5th.
And I dunno, I've played a ton of Japanese games and VNs with very minimal censorships. Seen lots of manga that way too. Some don't even censor like say the vulva, only the interior whenever it's shown, while for dicks it's like 1/5th the head.
But that's irrelevant because it doesn't change a single thing I said. This dev released his game on Steam and is now also uncensoring for Steam because people really wanted it uncensored over here... jeeze it's almost exactly like everything I just said turned out to be right.
Enough people wanted it uncensored that he caved (and both Kagura and Otakuplan spend a lot of effort uncensoring too because they have a clue). Dlsite doesn't allow this, but oh wait he released it on Steam, also like Kagura and Otakuplan. There are also a lot of VN sites that sell uncensored versions of VNs! Gasp.
Like I said... the demand is definitely there, and today in the tender year of 2025 with the indie scene better supported than ever before, if you released your game censored without a way to uncensor, it's not because your hands are tied.
To be clear this isn't a personal attack on this dev in particular, I get it, it's just my continued disdain for the utter stupidity of Japan's government, which is not exclusive to Japan, and the everlasting irony of being both the country with the most public kink spiral and the one most desperate to censor it, tame shit included, all but not quite ban it because it's part of their culture.
They're even formally protesting on a internationally governmental level against master card/visa and foreign pressure against loli chars (including SFW ones)/fanservice/etc in anime, manga, and porn by again saying it IS part of their creative culture. Like, what the fuck, I doubt there's a more jambled and confused first world country right now when it comes to this stuff.
