Following our news piece on Dispatch’s nudity and sexual censorship on its Switch version, Nintendo has come forward to explain it in more detail. In a statement offered by the House of Mario to GoNintendo, the company explained that this type of content moderation is required for anyone who wishes to run their games on Switch, Switch 2 or any other of its platforms.
“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.”
Is Dispatch sexual censorship just for the Switch or is it also in other platforms?
To be fair, every single version of Dispatch has the option to censor sexual or erotic content. Essentially, it’s just an option in the Options menu that allows you to toggle it on or off. As a result, frontal nudity like genitalia or breasts are hidden behind black boxes, and the same goes for other items, such as a character giving the finger to someone. Also, sex sounds like moans are muted.
Except for Nintendo, and that’s how the whole discussion began: the option exists on Switch, but it is unactionable — meaning you can’t turn it off if you want to.
It is worth noting that Dispatch — a game chock full of adult humor and themes around a superhero workplace whose main character is the dispatcher of villains-turned-heroes — was not edited in any way to please Nintendo. Instead, the company chooses to change the reaction of the game’s systems to content that does not meet its criteria.
As IGN points out, however, fans online took the matter to heavy discussion, given that the Switch itself has other examples that did not run afoul on Nintendo’s parameters: such is the case with Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk 2077, for instance. The latter even got to a point where two versions were released: in Japan, specifically, there is one version of Cyberpunk 2077 without mature content like nudity or enemy decapitation.
It is possible this comes from CERO, Japan’s age ratings board, which tends to be stricter in its enforcement of rules than, say, the United States’ ESRB or Brazil’s Cocind, for instance (speaking as a Brazilian, Dispatch has a 16 and above age rating). But it’s unlikely we’ll ever know for sure without all the parties involved coming forward about this.
