A lot of fuss kicked up over the indie game Yohjo Simulator from developer DeadFactory when it first appeared on Steam Greenlight. The title received a lot of backlash for being a simulator for pedophiles and for pushing the boundaries on including loli characters in a game, since players donned the role of a 10-year-old girl. Well, shortly after launching on Steam on November 17th, Yohjo Simulator was then pulled. Sekai Project has finally revealed why the game was pulled.

In a post over on Steam, indie publisher Sekai Project – best known for publishing risque visual novels – stated…

“A couple days after the game was released an overwhelming amount of complaints were filed for the game’s removal from the Steam storefront. What we had discovered as the root cause for the complaints was an inappropriate scene that we found to be in poor taste. The red flag was immediately raised on our end and the game was pulled as a result of this content. We were in shock that this unacceptable scene was in the game and that we had completely missed catching it before release.”

The scene in question consisted of another little girl in a swimsuit, laying face down in an alleyway while a man stood over her. The implication of the scene was made more poignant with the fact that the little girl’s underwear were laying beside her.

According to Sekai Project, this was unacceptable.

The publisher stated…

“While we enjoy releasing games that appeal to all walks of life, we also take this sort of thing very seriously, and do not consider it a joking matter by any means. Yohjo Simulator has been removed from the Steam storefront until further notice.

“We would like to formally apologize for not having discovered this content before the game was released. Had we known it would have been swiftly removed from the game. Unfortunately, this was not the case and we are truly sorry for the severe oversight on our part.”

The concept of child rape did not sit well with Sekai Project and they state that they will be vigilantly overseeing the content in games that they publish from now on. They also state that they don’t want anything “even remotely” similar to the implied rape in the games that they publish.

On the up and up, for those of you who enjoyed Yohjo Simulator, the company states that they will be re-releasing the game following the modifications to the content, stating…

“Once we are confident that such content has been removed, Yohjo Simulator will then be placed back on the Steam storefront. The removal of this content will not affect the core gameplay. During this time, we will also be looking into adding additional gameplay features and in-game content as well.”

Outside of the implied rape scene there wasn’t much else to talk about Yohjo Simulator since it’s a fairly bare bones game. In fact, the biggest complaint was that there just wasn’t anything to do in the title.

Let’s play Yohjo Simulator (PC game on Steam) developed by DEADFACTORY 1080p 60fps

So there’s a new Simulator game out called Yohjo Simulator out. What do you simulate in this game? I honestly have no idea. Running and kicking?

Interestingly, the commenters seem to feel as if Sekai Project’s decision is about enforcing the enactment of self-censorship.

User Fnights stated…

“[…] Asking the developer to censor his own creature because of a joke? Even if is distasteful for someone you haven’t any rights to edit a game based on your personal morals, or morals of people that probably will never play the game in the first place.”

 

“The developer can refuse to autocensor his own creature, Sekai can’t force censorship, they just blackmail the devs, or censorship or no release. Hope the original developer refuse to alter his own game and leave Steam and this crappy publisher.”

Sekai Seifuku was in agreement with Fnights, writing…

“Since when is it ok for publishers to censor a game they didn’t make?”

Others like Gas mask TV thief felt the cries of censorship were overblown, stating…

“you fanboys need to quit crying SJW, sekai themselves admitted that they had no intention of adding that scene because they thought it was not appropriate, leave them alone and let them have the freedom to modify the game as they please”

American McGee, famed video game developer extraordinaire, recently stated that all art deserves to be expressed or it all deserves to be censored. Basically he was advocating on behalf of artists to do what they feel best fits their creative desires. In this case, was the implication of something too much for the sake of art or was Sekai too quick to pull the trigger on policing the content in the game?