Nintendo Rejects Censorship of Games

Today Nintendo published a transcript of the questions & answers sessions of its 79^th General Meeting of Shareholders and President Shuntaro Furukawa talked about the company’s stance on the wave of censorship affecting the gaming industry.

One of the attendees mentioned in recent years that platform holders overlapped the age ratings with third-party agencies like CERO and ESRB with their own restrictions of content in games. The attendee then asked how Nintendo will deal with the content of games on their platforms in this case.

The President Shuntaro Furukawa then explained that if the age rating is obtained by a third-party board, Nintendo wants the customers to understand that the content of the games and target age with what’s described though the rating.

If Nintendo were to regulate the software and content, telling developers what to do, then they would be hindering the diversity and fairness among games. This would explain why they allowed Madworld on the Wii, which is one of the more brutal and goriest games on that platform.

Furukawa also added that Nintendo’s consoles have parental controls which allows parents to block content that they would believe to be harmful to their children. This would make sense because it is up to the parents as a whole to decide what their kids to play, and know of what the content is in the game, instead of having the game censored when released.

So now Nintendo has a big stance on this as opposed to how Sony is handling the sexual content in their games by making their standards stricter. Which is odd since games like Dead or Alive Extreme have been available on the Platform for some time. In the end it seems that Nintendo is a Family-Friendly company that allows the families themselves decide what to censor at home.

For more news coverage dealing with censorship, check it out here.