Nowadays, it’s surprising to see that it isn’t Nintendo who censors games but Sony. In the past, it wasn’t like this!

Nintendo always seemed to be a family-friendly company that always took a step away from sexuality and gore, rejecting these aspects from their games. Now, this approach has been changed significantly in the past two years on the Nintendo Switch. Shuntaro Furukawa, the president of Nintendo, talked about this subject as well on the annual meeting for the shareholders.

The president of the big N got several questions, and one of them was whether Nintendo will censor the third-party developed/published games like how Sony does (like in Devil May Cry 5, which we wrote about). Furukawa responded by saying that Nintendo doesn’t want to participate in censorship, and they instead send the games to a third-party rating board (CERO for Japan, PEGI for Europe, and ESRB for North America), and he added that parents can continue to use the functions of the parental controls so that their children cannot access adult content.

He thinks that if the platform-holding companies (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft) started censoring in the games, the diversity and fairness in them would be significantly hurt. „Nintendo, as do 3rd-parties and their software, applies for an objective rating from 3rd-party organizations prior to release. If platform-holding companies choose arbitrarily, diversity and fairness in game software would be significantly inhibited. We provide parental controls that can be used to apply limits,” Furukawa said. Fair play.

It’s refreshing to see this from Nintendo. They realized that leaving censorship – if it’s even necessary – to companies like PEGI is a better idea, meaning there might not be much of a difference between a game’s Japanese and Western version. (Earthbound on the SNES, for example, had the smoking references taken out.)

Source: DualShockers