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Grazzul
Member Posts: 21
in Guild Wars 2
Adam Sessler finally gets on talking about Guild Wars 2.
Guild Wars 2 begins at 27:45, but you should really listen to the whole show. The beginning part about the Supreme Court Decision is an important event in gaming history for all of us.
Casey makes a very bold statement...
http://www.g4tv.com/videos/53940/feedback-supreme-court-video-game-ruling/?quality=hd
Comments
Sneak fix
See if you can find it ;D
"It has potential"
-Second most used phrase on existence
"It sucks"
-Most used phrase on existence
I see what you did there!
That........ makes sense. xD
Actually, it's important for everybody, not just Americans. If game companies can't sell the games in America, they're not going to make them, or going to edit them so they can sell them here. Especially when most games are developed in America- these developers aren't going to make games they can't sell at home, even if they're perfectly acceptable in other countries.
Not all games are made in America as far as I know
Not that it is pointless outside America but its just not as important to people outside
"It has potential"
-Second most used phrase on existence
"It sucks"
-Most used phrase on existence
It's not really important at all to anyone outside America. It's short-sighted to think it is, really.
What I'm getting at is that things are already this way in Germany and Australia to varying degrees, and what happens is that content is simply edited. The game is built, then parts are cut out depending on the audience they're selling it to. If this had happened in America, then the UK, for example, would still get the game in its original form, but the US would get a toned down version.
In fact, this has already happened. *Gasp!* There was this little game called Fahrenheit in Europe and it featured necrophiliac sex, which was amazingly funny to anyone who had a sense of humour, because the whole concept of the end part of the game was just made of the purest form of silly anyway. Powered on nonsensoleum stuff. It was a great laugh. Anyone who's played this game is going to know what I'm talking about, it was... so OTT, it was bad B-Movie OTT, and in its own particularly and merrily twisted way, it was glorious.
You could engage in flying kung-fu with the manifestation of all technology, everywhere. And you were turned into a zombie in the latter half of the game. Great stuff. This has to be going somewhere, though, right? Yes, it is. Sorry if I segued a little, there, but Fahrenheit truly is a wonderful little exercise in totally batshit. But the problem was was that it was too batshit for the US, so chunks of it got cut - most notably the necrophilic sex scene. (Which was actually a minigame! A minigame with lots of unf!)
Apparently it was believed that fragile American sensibilities wouldn't be able to cope with necrophilic sex (and some other things).
So the US ended up with an incomplete version named Indigo Prophecy. You couldn't even complete that version! If you tried to get a totally complete score, because of the cut parts, you could only get 82%. Eventually a patch and a Director's Cut version were released to remedy these problems, but the Director's Cut version was simply the version that was released in the UK to begin with. The game was voiced fully by American actors, but then the parts that would be offensive to Americans were cut, but left in for the English-speaking European audience since they didn't think we'd be offended.
(And we weren't. We just found it really, really funny.)
So yeah. This happens. America is not the centre of the Universe and developers/publishers know this as well as anyone. They're going to develop a game in a complete way, and then they'll just cut out the parts that don't fit. And here's something that's going to make certain patriotic people fume - America is not the biggest entertainment market in the world. It's about the third or fourth. I believe China is at the top right now.
It's not that America is the center of the universe, or that games aren't "Localized" to different countries based upon culture/laws/etc. Nazi symbols and such get removed from games for sale in parts of Europe, I believe blood is removed for sales in Germany, human skeletons get edited out for China releases, and many other things. However, game companies make games for the market that they're in, and localize the games for other places. As you say, China has a giant game market- but American companies don't make games designed for China and then localize them to the US market, they make games for the US market and localize them for China. Other countries won't get these games in their "original form", while America gets a "toned down version" because the games will be made in the "toned down version" because they're being made by Americans.
If games had to have a significantly lower level of violence in order to be sold in America, American game studios wouldn't be making games with high amounts of violence and then cutting it out for the US release- they'd be making games they can sell in America. Gaming companies not in America would probably be less effected, and would just have to localize their games to the US.
The reason this is important beyond the US isn't because the United States is the center of the universe, or that Americans buy more video games than anybody else- rather that the US is home to a very large portion of the game development industry. Most of the games played in Europe and North America are developed in the United States, and so if American companies have to start changing the games they develop to sell in the US, those games will be different for everybody playing them, not just Americans.
This isn't to say that the law would have necessarily had the impact that people were worried about- it could be that retailers would treat California as a special case, and the rest of the US would have gone on as normal. There's also a number of Canadian, European, and a lot of Asian developers that would have gone on as normal regardless, and localized low-violence versions for the United States. However, thinking that laws in America won't effect things that you buy from American companies that are intended for American as well as global markets is ludicrous.
Woah.. guys you're getting kinda off-topic?
Eat me!