All evidence points to CERO. They won’t throw CERO under the bus by saying it outright, but it’s pretty clear.
The Switch 2 version of Dispatch is a universal binary for all regions, meaning it has to comply with all regions’ guidelines. The JP PS5 version that just launched has the same censorship, the only difference is that PS5 has a separate international version.
And we know that separate versions is an option on Switch 2, Cyberpunk 2077 has a censored JP version, but for whatever reason AdHoc chose to have one universal version here.
Ultimately I think it just reflects very poorly on AdHoc that none of this was disclosed prior to release, allowing this shitstorm of finger-pointing to happen.
AdHoc absolutely deserves the beating they’re taking. Even if they had no way to prevent the censorship they should’ve announced this a long time ago.
All evidence points to CERO.
Talking point: Nintendo Bad
Nintendo requires all games on its platforms to receive ratings from independent organizations and to meet our established content and platform guidelines. While we inform partners when their titles don’t meet our guidelines, Nintendo does not make changes to partner content. We also do not discuss specific content or the criteria used in making these determinations.
For anyone wanting a TL;DR.
It sounds like it was forced into a censored version by Nintendo’s standards. The article goes into more detail on it, but it sounds like the requirements for it to be playable in Japan are a part of the puzzle.
I have it on PC and can safely say it’s the definitive way to experience this game. Shame it’s censored on the Switch.
AdHoc released their own statement on Reddit
Okay let’s talk Switch release.
We’ve been quiet for the last few days not because we don’t want to address this stuff, but because we’ve been trying to make sure we’re being good partners with Nintendo. They’ve made their own statement regarding this issue:
“Nintendo requires all games on its platforms to receive ratings from independent organizations and to meet our established content and platform guidelines. While we inform partners when their titles don’t meet our guidelines, Nintendo does not make changes to partner content. We also do not discuss specific content or the criteria used in making these determinations.”
As Nintendo states, any game that’s going to be on the Nintendo platform needs to ‘meet [Nintendo’s] established content and platform guidelines.’ This is the key point. Nintendo has content guidelines. Our game didn’t meet those guidelines, so we made changes that would allow us to release on their platform. That’s what happened here. Honestly we thought this would be obvious since we’re the devs that released the fully uncensored version of the game on other platforms.
We initially assumed, like some of you, that because games like Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk are on the platform with similar types of uncensored mature content, Dispatch would be allowed to do the same. During the porting process it became clear that was not the case. So we asked that we include a disclaimer on the store page to inform customers that content would be different than on other platforms. We worked with Nintendo to get storefront language approved.
Where we absolutely need to take full ownership is the placement of that disclaimer. Again, it was our intent to go out of our way to tell people looking to buy the game that the content was censored. While we didn’t have complete control of the language, we did have control of the placement. Wires got crossed and we put the disclaimer in the field literally titled “Disclaimer”, instead of the “About The Game” section. We didn’t catch this until after the launch when we saw people saying we should have called out the changes on the store page, and we went to go make sure it was there. It technically has been the entire time, just in the absolute worst spot that makes it look like we were trying to hide it.
This is 100% our mistake and it was fixed in the Americas store pages a few hours after launch to give more visibility. We’ve also added a disclaimer before purchase. As of writing this, the other regions have either published this change or are in the process of review.
So what now?
We’re already working with Nintendo on a path forward. While we can’t make any specific promises just yet, we’re confident we’ll be able to push an update to address at least some of the censored content. I’ll get ahead of it now and say that between dev time and the console submission process, we’re talking weeks not days.
To our fans who were looking forward to playing the uncensored version on Switch, we’re truly sorry. People have a right to be pissed. Lots of lessons learned here. Thanks for sticking with us. More soon.
I’ve seen people elsewhere on the Internet state that the Japanese PS5 version is fully censored in Japan but uncensored overseas, same as Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher. Maybe Nintendo didn’t suggest a separate Japanese version as an option, or maybe they did but it would have been too expensive. Still, this looks like it’s an issue with CERO.
I doubt that is the case, as there are other games with comparable content that are published on Nintendo’s store.
This is basically just a non-answer that doesn’t say much of anything at all. It could just as easily be one of the ratings organizations to blame, based on that statement, which seems likelier for the reasons others have mentioned.
Yeah, Nintendo are fine with 18-rated games. All evidence points to this being the result of having to comply with the rules of a ratings agency, most likely CERO. But if this isn’t Nintendo’s fault it means people can’t complain about Nintendo.
Nintendo has a weird thing with censorship. I just went to their Eshop site and typed in “sexy”. I don’t feel I can post the results here. I landed 13 hits, with many having “Hentai” in the title. Some of those results have popped up when my child is looking for games to buy, so they’re not even age restricted. So we get this case where games that are crafted with a care to quality get censored, but people can upload hentai to the shop with no real trouble. It doesn’t make sense.
AFAIK none of those games actually do have explicit content in them, they’re just named that way in the hopes of tricking suckers into buying them.
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