Censorship In Gaming – Where Is The Line?

I recently got a chance to review Senran Kagura Burst on the PS4 which some of you may only be familiar with due to the stir it created among the fanbase when Sony ordered the removal of intimacy mode. For those not aware the game has a dress-up mode where you can take a bunch of school girls and dress them up in various outfits, some over the top with most skimpy and revealing (this aspect is still in the game).  While doing this you can also “touch up” the characters and basically grope them.

Now Sony must have decided that was not a line it wanted to cross (or allow to be crossed on its platform) but the company is seemingly fine with these same underage girls flaunting their near naked boobs, butts and crotches, which seems a little odd to me.

Now believe it or not I’m actually against censorship, despite me thinking it’s a bit creepy being upset that they have taken away the ability to grope school girls in games. I get it, I understand, you just want the game delivered as it was in Japan. If no one had intimacy mode in any version of the game then it would not be an issue I guess, but what I don’t understand is how in this current society a game (or games) like this still exist.

Recently Dead or Alive’s director made the decision to make the dead or alive games less “sexualised” despite every version of the game up to this point having crazy boob physics and revealing outfits. This is clearly a response to the world we live in today as something similar happened to Soul Calibur with it trending on social media for quite a while that the women fighters were sexualised for the sake of being sexualised with one particular gaming site running the headline “At E3, Soul Calibur’s Objectified Women Felt Like A Relic Of The Past” (tbf that site can be right on the cusp of SJW).

When fighting games that don’t really sexualise things other than outfits and get attention like that how is there a future for full-blown ecchi titles on a gaming console like the PS4?

Are games like this going to exist and to hell with what people think?

We seem to be living in a very reactive period in time at the moment and someone always seems to be offended by something and I just wonder how long it is before people turn their attention to a game like Senran Kagura and they vanish entirely from the gaming landscape. In the past, I have always thought “you can always import” but with companies like Koei and Namco Bandai reacting to western reactions I have to wonder how long Japan will be safe from censorship.

So like the thread title says where is the line?

Where do companies draw the line and decide content is too much and has to be cut?

Where do we as consumers draw the line with regards to our support for developers that buckle and censor their games for our market?

Are you someone that already refuses to buy censored games?

Sound off in the comments and let me know your thoughts.