From what I can tell it goes a bit beyond just interchanging boy with gnome alas my street japanese is limited and might very well give me the wrong impression here. Will take your word on it.
It kinda does, but not for any legitimate reason. At the end of the day, most of the publishers for these games are aiming to use already existing platforms to sell their games, which puts them at the mercy of those platforms rules. And some of those platforms (cough cough sony) take it so far that they are basically puritanical cults. There was a case in the early 2000's where the supreme court did rule that fictional characters are outside the bounds of law, E.G. you can't go to prison for playing this title:
https://f95zone.to/threads/loli-kidnap-riko-chan-is-missing-studio-ws.25050/ but that doesn't stop it from being a bit weird and publishers from outright killing that content on their platforms. Censorship is weird.
Considering that all their releases,where said content is present,do the same thing Im very inclined towards calling it a practise. They might very well prove me wrong in the future but presently that stands(though if you can point me towards a recent title where they changed that approach Im all ears). As for Steam...yeah no. Unofficial patches are a thing and Kagura has shown absolutely no intend to restore said content. I dont subscribe to the "better censored than nothing" school of thought so we will have to agree to disagree on that
I agree with you, but I doubt it. I like Acerola games, but there's no question that they are low effort. Many if not all of Kagura Games titles are low budget, low effort games at the end of the day, and Kagura Games won't take the time, effort and money to create their own published platform to make the game run and instead will either block the interaction or change things to "not kid". It's just that much easier for them to make the game for steam outright and bend to Steam's will. In some cases it gets kinda annoying, that new cucked wife game they came out with a few months back has a good example for this. One of the mechanics is you can get discovered cheating, and the husband turns out to like being cucked, and can go to various towns people to "convince them" to have sex with his wife. One of them is Ted, the kid who lives in the house right above yours. In the normal game, this results in you banging the kids brains out. In the Kagura Games release, you can talk to him and initiate it... but then it automatically goes "oh no I can't do this to poor ted". Mind you it does this literally directly after the line "And this is how I led Ted down the path of darkness...". Censorship at the end of the day is going to be a problem, since soccermom America flips their shit at vague, general ideas more than anything else.
You probably know jap better than me, since I can at best pick some spoken words here and there I'm just relaying things other people (that know jap) told me.
Much of it's speculation. At the end of the day, Japanese dev's have no problem selling their products to the west, but don't want to deal with the endless screeching that will result from puritanical weirdo's.
mmh, given that shotacon isn't an exceptionally widespread fetish, among the recent games the one where they had some was Ideology in Friction. Nothing exceptional though, since is just the protagonist getting harassed by shotas, in a certain event giving some Sex Ed to one, and in another having sex. The mostly call them "boy" and "young", just rarely "kid" but they evidently do try to not tell those words too much and I can see the reason.
Also this. Something else that determines a lot is the actual fetishes that a game has. Straight vanilla sex between consenting adults is going to be far less provocative than a character having sex with a "Young person". The more obscure a fetish, the less likely it'll get financial backing or have any standing support. Though Cloud Meadows does get over $40K per month so I could be completely wrong here.
Afaik, all the retailers that are not Steam (JAST, Mangagamer, Fakku) implemented the "restored" version days after the restoration patch was around.
Yeah but those platforms are all way smaller than steam as well. Personally, I think it's literally stupid to try and sell a porn game on Steam, even if it has a greater audience the fact is steam as a platform isn't really for porn games. And porn itself is already pretty niche. I'd honestly say these platforms are just trying too hard to find a bigger audience to make more money, you don't really "make money" in the niche porn industry.
Well that really shouldnt be necessary in the first place.
They are dealing with a niche game in a niche genre in a niche community. Delivering the best product possible to build and please your core audience should be your primary goal at this point. Releasing a cut together steam patch to keep up front is one thing but then never coming around to actually restoring the rest of the content really only hurts their reputation
Yeah but their reputation is already that of "that company that localizes low budget porn games". I'll be honest, you should really lower your expectations when it comes to many of these companies.
Yeah I see your point but as someone who had the honor of growing up in a censorship happy country,just getting a mediocre version is unacceptable to me. Go the whole distance or dont touch it in the first place.
I agree with you, but I'd also point out that (assuming your in the US like me) nothing that either of us does can get the companies to stop. They listen to soccermom America, because soccermom America is enormous.
Didnt know Fakku picked it up too. Only brought JAST up because of their hard stance on loli/shota censorship back in the day. Its just nice to see they moved away from that.
Oh that stance changed as soon as that ruling I mentioned above somewhere came out. Long story short, it was deemed that a fictional character does NOT legally constitute the dreaded C followed by a P. If you draw loli hentai, you're not creating illegal content. If you have loli hentai, you're not in possession of illegal content. You might be a weirdo, but that's it. That doesn't stop people from plastering your name all over the internet though, if they just don't like it. There is a legitimate porn site that actually had a kerfluffle about this in the mid 2000's, that "innocent high" website. There was a whole crusade to get the website taken down, even though every porn actress/actor on the site was at least 18, because the premise of it was "a high school where everybody fucks the teacher" or something like that. I remember finding my dad's laptop open one night and that website was up on it, I had myself a giggle. Basically, even if something is not the dreaded double letters, if it looks like it COULD be, some people aren't even willing to chance it. That's it.
Basically it all comes back to the combination of censorship, and Kagura Games being very low effort.
