Herman begins by recalling what Nintendo has already said this week: any game released on its platform must receive an age rating from the relevant independent body and comply with its content rules. «This is the key point,» says the developer. «Nintendo has content guidelines. Our game didn't meet them, so we made changes that allowed us to release it on their platform. This is what happened. We honestly thought it would be obvious, considering we are the same developers who have released an uncensored version of the game on other platforms.»
Initially AdHoc Studio assumed that, if in the Switch and Switch 2 catalog there are games like The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 that have adult content, Dispatch could be launched without any problem. However, as the studio worked on bringing its title to Nintendo consoles, it became clear that this was not going to be the case. At this point, the development team requested that a message appear on the game's eShop listing notifying users that the game's content was different from that on other platforms.
The development teams do not have complete control over the message, but they do decide where it appears, and this is where the error came about. AdHoc Studio requested that the warning appear in a field titled «Disclaimer» instead of the «About The Game» section. They didn't realize their mistake until they started receiving messages from players saying they should have reported the censorship. «Technically, [el mensaje] It's been there all along, but in the worst possible place. […]» says Herman. The developer takes the blame for placing the message in the wrong place and assures that it has already been corrected.
Now, in the Dispatch tab in the eShop you can read the following note in the game description: «Some of the adult content from the original version of Dispatch has been modified.» Censorship in Dispatch consists of covering breasts, penises and obscene gestures with black rectangles, as well as omitting offensive words.
The issue that AdHoc Studio does not comment on is whether there is the possibility of launching a censored version of Dispatch for Japan, a country where the ZERO age rating system is much stricter than the European PEGI or the American ESRB, and another unmodified one for the West. For example, CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 has a censored version for Japan that eliminates nudity and reduces levels of violence, while in the rest of the territories the content is the original but with the option to censor nudity.