Genital Jousting. It’s this week’s weirdest game by far. And while it might look like a (literal) blast to play, it’s not available to Australians. And there’s a good reason why.
Early this morning, when the world was waking up to the latest morning glory from Free Lives (who also made Broforce) their publisher left this note on Twitter:
Quick Genital Jousting notes:
– prohibited on Twitch
– not for sale in Australia and NZ
– extremely erotic, play at your own risk— Devolver Digital (@devolverdigital) November 17, 2016
Why not Australia and New Zealand, you might ask. Through their local PR, Devolver sent me this statement:
“We’re proactively saving ourselves time from a likely ban in those territories based on previous games banned for similar content.”
The position is understandable considering the ringer that the Classification Board put Devolver through when they were trying to get Hotline Miami 2 into Australia. They tried challenging the Board’s decision, but lost and the game’s co-creator ended up telling one user just to /”pirate the game”.
“If it ends up not being released in Australia … just pirate it after release,” Hotline Miami’s Jonatan Soderstromm said at the time.
Submitting a game for classification isn’t free. So considering the fact that Genital Jousting is a game that quite literally involves fucking other dicks in the arse, it’s understandable that Devolver don’t want to waste their time. It looks like a great couch co-op title though; good thing VPN’s exist.
Comments
13 responses to “Devolver Isn’t Even Trying To Get Genital Jousting Classified In Australia”
This game has drugs?
Can I just say a warm hello and Happy Friday to all those new readers looking for Pokemon information.
Welcome!
http://www.kotaku.com.au/tags/pokmon/
Here you go.
I don’t know about you, but when I’m looking for Pokemon tips, my first thought is googling “genital jousting”, or “kids in sandbox”, depending on the time of day…
The timing really couldn’t be better (or worse), could it
Submitting a game for classification isn’t expensive (the website says about $1600 or so from memory) but there is a whole lot of work involved from the publisher’s side of things.
And yes, explicit dicks in bums (even if they are only semi-turgid) are going to make it a tough proposition.
Yeah, but if they did it once, I’m fairly sure they would get better over time. Perhaps they could ask good friend around to help? Who knows … they might even end up enjoying it!
None of which changes the fact that the devs are just as likely to get the game approved by Australia’s puritan censors by flushing their time and money down the toilet than they are by actually paying the fee and going through the process.
It generally is more of a tough proposition when they are only semi-turgid*
*may or may not be from personal experience, who knows
Oh please, the board thought a pixel man preparing to assault a pixel woman was over the top.
When it comes to sexual content, they flip their shit as if they were a bunch of 5YOs who don’t want to know where babies come from.
Apparently the people who rate videogames (Not just the Australian classification board, but all over the world) don’t even play the games, they just watch footage of them and rate them based off what they see.
If places like steam don’t care about our consumer or tax laws, why should they care about our classification laws?
Whelp, thats disappointing,
What I found interesting is while I could not buy Hotline Miami 2, nor did they give me a code for it on Steam when it was a humble monthly. I was able to download it off the Download section on the Humble Store when I did get it on the Humble Monthly, dispite every other roadblock to avoid getting it.
just puts a new peak on the tip of the shit bad games on steam
scuse my french
R 18+
HIGH LEVEL ADULT THEMES, SEXUAL REFERENCES, NUDITY.
Surely that’d be fine…
Wow, so now devs are actively avoiding Aus thanks to our backward ass ratings board.
It’s like when that controversial game HATRED was released and those devs were like, “well it’ll probably get banned there so who cares”. I mean the game turned out to be a steaming pile of mediocre, edgy shit anyway so no big loss there ( i played it, it truly was awful) – but you see where I’m going with this…
Don’t find this at all surprising (though of course disappointing) to add it to the long list of smaller indie style games that haven’t been submitted for classification in Oz over the past year or two. Our system must be much more onerous than similar ones in other countries.
Will someone tell Devolver that NZ is not Australia and we have ratings for adult games here? Seriously!
From Wikipedia – “In New Zealand, games are classified by the country’s Office of Film and Literature Classification. If they are dubbed “objectionable” in all cases, then they are considered banned. In this case, the game in question is not only illegal to sell, but illegal to own, possess, or import. Games are typically banned and classified as “objectionable content” when they contain extreme violence, offensive depictions of cruelty, animal cruelty, sexual content involving children, or graphic depictions of sexual content, including sexual fetishes that are “offensive & abhorrent” (depictions of urination, bestiality, necrophilia, urophilia, coprophilia, and/or incest.)”
They’re totally safe to release it here. =_=