Skullgirls got review-bombed on Steam after some art changes

Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: elmapulwhat is next, rockstar will make an patch so you cant kill any one anymore in GTA? and you will say that is not censorship?

yes that would not be censorship. You playing a video game is not you expressing your right to free speech. Rockstar changing their game so that you can't kill any one any more is actually Rockstar expressing their right to free speech.

Now Rockstar being forced to do this by a 3d party like the Government, now that would have been censorship by that 3d party. But this rarely if ever happens in our western democracies, yes the alt-right is crying loud about companies doing this do appease to "a different audience" but that is just them crying about it, as normal zero points of evidence is ever presented (which they see as proof that it is a conspiracy). Nor would it follow any forms of logic since this "other audience" is a very small group of people that would never buy the game anyway (which the companies knows full well) so that is not why they are doing changes like this (and there is also not a lot of cases of companies doing this either, I mean Skull Girls is not an example of a company even doing this and yet it will still be an a list somehwere of a situation where it happened).

you are defining the artist as an company not the individuals who work at it.
sure i dont expect nintendo to allow an creator to kill mario or anything like that, but i dont expect then to launch an game and change it for different regions, or change it after launch.
they gave their artists some creative constraints, the artists wrote, draw etc in that limitations their design goals and philosopy might be completely different if they had other constraints.

for example, if you know you cant kill an character you might try to find other ways to create an emotional impact on your art, if you writing thinking you can do that, then someone else remove that from the story, then your story might end up without any scenes of emotional impact as an result of that change.
if an company hired me to write an story and i didnt agree with the creative freedoms they gave me i could simply not help then with their project, they would be able to relase it anyway, but not slap my name in the credits with something like "from creator of X,Y,Z book/movie/game" (assuming i was famous), that is completely different from they leting me write what i want, then changing a lot of things without informing me and keeping my name in the credits.
hell the gaming industry was infamous for ghost writing in the past anyway.


and speaking on censorhsip vs freedom of expression:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWqvaMEFIdI

Well the way things like this game works is that a bunch of creative people are signing away their creative works to the company so the company is the creator in that sense. Now for SkullGirls it also happens that the "new" company is the original designers that just created a new company due to the problems with their former boss so here there is even less a company decision as such.

Having a creator having complete expressive freedom when working for a games developer is probably something that you will never see. One of the reasons is that it is the company that is legally responsible for what said creator would create so even by that single reason no company would risk doing it.

Not sure what the reason behind bringing in a discussion of the film industry from a former dictatorship?


Last edited by F.Ultra on 7 July 2023 at 6:36 pm UTC

The changes seem pretty minor to me. Still not a children's game, so it's not like the style or mood or rating changed.

In principle, it is a weird thing to do to a game many people purchased a long time ago. Doesn't feel right.

Quoting: 14The changes seem pretty minor to me. Still not a children's game, so it's not like the style or mood or rating changed.

In principle, it is a weird thing to do to a game many people purchased a long time ago. Doesn't feel right.

For me, it is the fact they censored it at all. I am also pissed there have been charging/ censoring of books by long dead writers. Who gave them the right to alter the work of others?

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: 14The changes seem pretty minor to me. Still not a children's game, so it's not like the style or mood or rating changed.

In principle, it is a weird thing to do to a game many people purchased a long time ago. Doesn't feel right.

For me, it is the fact they censored it at all. I am also pissed there have been charging/ censoring of books by long dead writers. Who gave them the right to alter the work of others?

I am pretty sure the contract they signed gave them this right, that's usually how it works.

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: 14The changes seem pretty minor to me. Still not a children's game, so it's not like the style or mood or rating changed.

In principle, it is a weird thing to do to a game many people purchased a long time ago. Doesn't feel right.

For me, it is the fact they censored it at all.

Generally speaking, I'm not a fan of censorship. In this specific case, I'm not bothered enough for it to be my hill to die on.

1. The author of the original content made the changes for everyone, not some other entity that only changes it for certain people.
2. I don't disagree with the specific changes made. I don't think removal of the red armbands has any benefit, but I also am not gonna fight to retain that image. Just not a big deal to me.

I'll go on a short tangent like you did. :) Amazon's TV depiction of the Rings of Power. Some Black Elves. Some Black Dwarves. Some Black Hobbits. It makes no sense in Middle Earth. They shouldn't have made that change. What they could have done was made an entire race Black: Dwarves, or maybe Hobbits if you stretch it. They simply cannot make Elves Black in any number and be in agreement with the literature. Now, that is something I get a little more angry about. If you want your fantasy world to reflect the real world, write a new story with its own world instead of bastardizing someone else's creation. At the end of the day, it's entertainment -- not the most important thing in the world. But entertainment affects what we find normal since we spend so much time consuming it. I think a lot of people in 1st world countries watch actors in entertainment more than they interact with real people, so it does have an impact on people forming their opinions.

Quoting: 141. The author of the original content made the changes for everyone, not some other entity that only changes it for certain people.

It would have been different if it was the original author. This is just the new owner. Much like Amazon owning the rights (at least enough of them) to mangle Tolkien's years of world building...

Quoting: Metallinatus

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: 14The changes seem pretty minor to me. Still not a children's game, so it's not like the style or mood or rating changed.

In principle, it is a weird thing to do to a game many people purchased a long time ago. Doesn't feel right.

For me, it is the fact they censored it at all. I am also pissed there have been charging/ censoring of books by long dead writers. Who gave them the right to alter the work of others?

I am pretty sure the contract they signed gave them this right, that's usually how it works.

This goes back to my other point about art being modified years later by whomever feels they have the right to change that art to whatever current levels of acceptance.

Let's take an extreme example of something like this (I was thinking of this the other day due to this subject matter);
Mein kampf. What if some publisher decided to edit this book and change it around so that it looks much less like the work of an evil ego-maniacal dictator, and instead just an elderly gentleman that had some political views. Many, many years from now, and with how atrocious our school system is in the USA..., they could potentially turn it into something people slowly start to agree with and ignore how terrible of a person Hitler was. This could very well be done by censoring things out that make people feel bad (for whatever reason).

Art is Art, for whatever level of acceptance that is. (Mind you, I couldn't really consider Mein Kampf anything but terrible, but much like I say about people making 'non-offensive gaming tables' for D&D, sometimes you need to bring up some terrible atrocities to entice people to be the hero.)

So yes, while this is just a dumb game that the original artists / developers made a little risque, and it has no real bearing on anything anyone deeply cares about; the idea of the censorship and modifications by another team, even if they own the rights to it, sicken me. Imagine if another game series that is far more popular got a similar treatment. Say Grand Theft Auto... people would lose their minds!

Quoting: 14What they could have done was made an entire race Black: Dwarves, or maybe Hobbits if you stretch it. They simply cannot make Elves Black in any number and be in agreement with the literature. Now, that is something I get a little more angry about. If you want your fantasy world to reflect the real world, write a new story with its own world instead of bastardizing someone else's creation.

The problem with modern day Hollyweird... they can't. Look at all the current things coming out recently. The Witcher; writers hate and mock the original source. Wheel of Time; show runners hate the fans and the source material. Rings of Power; fired the living expert of all things Tolkien. Any of the successful shows have either almost been canceled (The Expanse), or been based off of books (the four previous ones all are, it's just The Expanse was actually good!)

Modern day Hollyweird is all about taking old famous movies, and basically remaking them / ruining them. Sure remakes were always a thing, but at least here and there, there have been amazing ones (Scarface always comes to mind). New sequels for old movies would be great... if they actually got old school writers to extend the characters, instead of newer writers that weren't even born when the original movies came out. All we can do to them is hit them where it hurts. Don't see them in the theater, don't pay for streaming services to watch them, just go back and watch some of the classics already in your physical library. That's what I've been doing lately. Enjoyed A Fish Called Wanda and Fierce Creatures lately. Re-watched the Arnie Conan movies as well! I'm thinking I should fire up The Goonies tonight...

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: 14What they could have done was made an entire race Black: Dwarves, or maybe Hobbits if you stretch it. They simply cannot make Elves Black in any number and be in agreement with the literature. Now, that is something I get a little more angry about. If you want your fantasy world to reflect the real world, write a new story with its own world instead of bastardizing someone else's creation.

The problem with modern day Hollyweird... they can't. Look at all the current things coming out recently. The Witcher; writers hate and mock the original source. Wheel of Time; show runners hate the fans and the source material. Rings of Power; fired the living expert of all things Tolkien. Any of the successful shows have either almost been canceled (The Expanse), or been based off of books (the four previous ones all are, it's just The Expanse was actually good!)

Modern day Hollyweird is all about taking old famous movies, and basically remaking them / ruining them. Sure remakes were always a thing, but at least here and there, there have been amazing ones (Scarface always comes to mind). New sequels for old movies would be great... if they actually got old school writers to extend the characters, instead of newer writers that weren't even born when the original movies came out. All we can do to them is hit them where it hurts. Don't see them in the theater, don't pay for streaming services to watch them, just go back and watch some of the classics already in your physical library. That's what I've been doing lately. Enjoyed A Fish Called Wanda and Fierce Creatures lately. Re-watched the Arnie Conan movies as well! I'm thinking I should fire up The Goonies tonight...

Yeah, I'm mostly with you. I do actually like the Witcher series though. The third season is close enough to The Time of Contempt book. I'm somewhat of a big Witcher fan, too. I have beaten all three games (100 hours in the 3rd one) and read four of the books so far. I have some gripes on the previous TV seasons, but I still like it.

I definitely have the same view about Hollywood writers. I'm not impressed with the stuff I've seen in recent years. But I'm also afraid of turning into an old fart too early that shuts out all pop culture. I suspect I'll get to a point someday where I really couldn't care less, but not quite there yet. ;)

As one of the people that left a negative my review was quite simple: no one asked for this and all it did was make those of us that actually play the game a target for both sides of the mob on this.

If you want to get more into it though some of the stuff that was removed/altered were incentives from the IndieGoGo. Stuff like the voice packs for Big Band and Peacock, the artbook, some color palettes, and my personal biggest issue the fan art (People donated to get their art in the game and it was all just removed without reaching out to ask them to edit it to comply with their rules.).

The tinfoil hat theory is that Future Club is purposely nuking the popularity because they're currently in a legal battle over Mike Z (the original designer and developer) for the game, and it doesn't look to good for them.