I know… It’s just… What are you gonna do? They’re very focused on money. Small indie devs whose games are generally considered curiosities and don’t go actually viral are of little concern to them. They’re far more interested in striking lucrative deals with hardware manufacturers, cozying up to advertisers so they can keep the ad revenue coming in, and also not getting sued by the parents of hoards of children who watch the streams.
They know exactly which side of their bread is buttered, and know that the moral high ground is expensive, while the amoral middleground is much better for the bank account.
Mass Effect has its issues; but they could scarcely have chosen a worse example to illustrate that(the Asari as a species are pure “Hey, isn’t it convenient that some aliens wholly unrelated to any terrestrial life form are basically horny bi chicks; but more blue? Awesome!”; but Shepard’s possible interactions with Liara are pretty innocuous; and she arguably scores well above average on getting independent character development not totally overshadowed by the fact that Cmdr. Shepard is The Player Character here; and don’t you NPCs forget it.)
Really, the interactions that leave a bad taste in your mouth are the “Apparently, open fraternization with your subordinates is totally cool in the Alliance Navy, even if you’ll be in the position to get one of them killed and choose which!” and the “Cerberus has allocated a cute redhead to handle menial secretarial duties and hero worship” thing.
That assumption would be wrong. Twitch, in all probability, has this policy to block porn games, and filth like the rape game. It is very hard to come up with a rule that can block one type of content, but allows… Whatever this game is… through.
I doubt very much that this is brogamer homophobia speaking, since this game really is pretty much its own thing, and these rules predate it.
Also, how would this conversation be different if this game was the same, but featured a women, and wasn’t published by an apparent indie darling?
Just fine? They are much more than fine. They are wonderful, even amazing. If the image is from Mars and there are three boobs, you could even say miraculous.
The only assumption that I made was that Twitch is large enough that its behavior should probably be modeled as a product of a profit-maximizing business strategy, rather than idiosyncratic personal decisions of the kind that can rule a smaller, less valuable, enterprise.
All my other assumption-type statements were made in the form of questions; possible hypotheticals that might explain this outcome in terms of a business-strategic response; but without any assertion of which one(s) are correct; and with the desire to gather further data from others.
Given my understanding of the demographics of games, especially those whose publishers do AAA ad campaigning, “maybe they fear disinterest and/or hostility because their audience is substantially straight men, some homophobic?” seemed reasonable enough to float as a hypothesis; but was not stated as a conclusion.
As for the hypothetical you propose: I suspect that full nudity would bring down the banhammer, don’t know how just toplessness would fare; but suspect that anything a non-indie publisher with any serious US sales footprint would risk selling would probably be approved.
There again, I proposed the hypothesis that major-label games are much less likely to face trouble because they are associated with valued potential advertisers; but it’s also true that, unlike indies, they probably do a lot of self-screening because they have their own controversies to avoid, so certain things simply wouldn’t come from non-indie sources.
“Is the assumption that the audience doesn’t want to see that sick gay stuff; bro; because they are all stereotypical Halo frat boys?”
This.
The policy doesn’t actually say “this only applies to images of men, or other totally gay stuff”. This policy, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with gender or orientation. It exists as a way of blockign smut, and as history teaches us, it is very hard to divide the smut from the “erotica” or in this case “artistic indie whatnot”. In a different context, with the genders flipped, this game would be almost indistinguishable from smut, it is only the context and stated intent of the developer that switches it to “art”. It is near impossible to make a policy that would block Rapequest 5000, or Showerboobsexytime from this game.
This has nothing to do with advertisers, or their consumers, hating “the gay”. I also doubt it has anything to do with the indies (the gaming landscape is very broad, and on PC I’m guessing the indies have roughly the same share as the AAA behemoths).
They are really bad when it comes to censorship. They have a “banned words” filter that streamers can disable if they choose to allow free speech in their chat rooms, but even with that disabled there is a long list of words they will not allow you to say. Censorship is the main area Twitch is currently shooting its self in the foot.
Twitch doesn’t have a problem with people playing Mount Your Friends on streams, so I don’t really think it’s a gender thing, so much as whether the game is specifically focused on sexuality, rather than have the sexuality be incidental or just part of the background… But that’s mostly just me really hoping for the best out of them. Here’s a gif from Mount Your Friends, I hope you giggle
That’s the point. It’s a grappling game with controls kind of like QWOP. You can move each limb one at a time and the goal it to make a human tower by climbing up the previous players. The highly kinetic dick is just for funsies.
