The developer of Yandere Simulator, a game about a sociopathic high school girl who murders her classmates, is demanding answers from Twitch, which banned the game exactly one year ago. Today, he posted a YouTube video describing his year of begging Twitch for a reason, which he says has led to nothing.
Yandere Simulator
Still in development, Yandere Simulator‘s protagonist is a high school girl who will do anything to be with her crush, including torturing, blackmailing and murdering her female classmates. Upskirt shots are a game mechanic. There’s some nudity, although genitalia and nipples are covered. You can electrocute enemies in the school bathroom or publicly shame them into suicide. “All characters depicted are 18 or older,” a caveat for Yandere Simulator reads against a pink background, “even if otherwise specified.”
YandereDev, who is widely anonymous, says he doesn’t know why Twitch banned users from streaming Yandere Simulator. After all, Twitch users can stream South Park: The Stick of Truth, which is full of butt stuff. The hyper-violent God of War series is also regularly streamed on Twitch. “All of the content in Yandere Simulator can be found in other games that are allowed in Twitch,” YandereDev says in a recent video.
Yandere Simulator is violent and contains nude scenes of high school girls, but in the company of the 34 other games Twitch has banned (plus all Adults-Only titles), like Suck My Dick or Die! and The Maiden Rape Assault: Violent Semen Inferno, it can seem a little out of place. A year later, YandereDev is demanding a reason.
After the game was first banned from Twitch in January 2016, YandereDev contacted the Twitch team once a month to ask why his game is banned. He wanted to know what he could adjust — more clothes on the naked high school girls? Fewer panty shots? But he says he heard nothing. At E3, he walked up to the Twitch booth to interrogate reps in person, but “not a single person there had ever heard of Yandere Simulator before,” he told me. Recently, over Twitter, he contacted individual Twitch representatives, who have not been able to help him out. Increasingly desperate, he’s gone on every forum and emailed every Twitch address he can find.
Twitch has not responded to Kotaku‘s request for comment.
Yandere Simulator
“I have no way of knowing what Twitch would like me to remove or change because Twitch won’t speak to me,” he says in his video. Since Twitch is such a big driver of publicity and money for indie games like Yandere Simulator, YandereDev feels that getting his title whitelisted could make a big difference.
So, YandereDev has been forced to speculate. In the video, YandereDev questions whether Twitch has an “anti-anime” bias, since several other banned titles are also in the anime style. Likely, that’s not the case, since a lot of those titles feature porny anime girls. He wonders whether a Twitch employee was immediately disgusted by Yandere Simulator‘s “senpai creation screen” and “assumed that it was a sort of child porn sex game”:
Yandere Simulator
One thing he points to in his video as a potential cause — without naming it — is feminists. Using viral footage of “angry feminists”, he implies that someone at Twitch may find Yandere Simulator personally distasteful because it has panty shots galore of high schoolers. The game’s premise forces girls in competition with each other for male attention, which isn’t reason enough to get banned, but, on top of the nudity and gore, could have rubbed someone the wrong way.
YandereDev counters that a little over half of the game’s fan base is comprised of women. “Yandere Simulator really was a toxic, disgusting, offensive, sexist misogynistic game, would most of the fans be female?” he asks.
YandereDev is extraordinarily communicative with his fan base, which numbers over a million, and inserts Easter eggs and features at their request. And since the game’s still a work in progress, YandereDev claims he’s happy to make changes to abide by Twitch’s guidelines. Now that indie devs must design games for both their fans’ tastes and streaming platforms’ guidelines, we may see more struggling to keep everyone pleased while making their games financially viable.
Comments
9 responses to “A Year Later, Yandere Simulator’s Dev Says Twitch Still Hasn’t Explained Ban”
Does Twitch have to give an explanation? The developer can demand one all he wants and publish videos proclaiming Twitch to hate indie developers. But the fact remains, YandereDev has developed a game that Twitch clearly doesn’t want on their service.
It could be simply scare of advertisers who don’t want their products being associated with a game with the content that Yandere Simulator contains.
I can understand his frustration in not having his game advertised on the biggest advertising platform for gaming. But he’s just got to live with it and move on, complaining or campaigning for Twitch to change aren’t going to work.
Nah they don’t have to give anyone anything. It would just be nice if they did.
In the end, it’s their service so it’s their rules.
Unrelated to Yandere Sim specifically, but there doesn’t seem to be anything to stop a game developer from paying Twitch to ban a rival game from being allowed to stream either. All Twitch would have to do is just stay silent.
I think the crux of the issue is that he’d be willing to change the game to comply with the rules but they refuse to disclose which rule he broke or what aspect caused the ban in the first place.
This seems like a no brainer. If the dev truly can’t figure out why their game was banned then it explains why they think making a game like that is even acceptable in the first place.
I’m curious if you actually watched the video — the game is no doubt distasteful (although it’s probably not the kind of game you think it is) but he makes a convincing argument. In short, there are worse games that Twitch allows; everything in Yandere Simulator is found in other games that Twitch has no problem with. Basically, the ban on his game is, apparently, completely arbitrary, and Twitch is actively refusing to tell him what he needs to do to get it unbanned.
Distasteful game or not, Twitch is being really unprofessional here.
It’s not acceptable to make a comedic game based on stupid anime tropes?
It’s maybe not obvious from the article, but Yandere Simulator is not a porn game about little kids. Nothing in it is genuinely meant to titillate the player (in that respect it’s faaaar less creepy than the anime its making fun of), it’s poking fun at fanservice and at character archetypes that are wide-spread in mainstream anime.
I mean, it is still a game about violent murder, but there’s nothing particularly lewd in it, so that should be fine right?
First off, if you want some attention for your work and answers to your questions, stand by it…
Anonymous somebody wants who what now?
I’m not saying put yourself out there like a twit, having a professional and personal identity isn’t some new concept.
If the game isn’t bad by your standards than stand beside it.
Second, if the crazy extreme feminists aren’t actively attacking your game, don’t attract them just so it brings in sales and support from their dopey opponents.
If those groups were warring over your stuff, it wouldn’t be a “maybe” or “perhaps” scenario, you would bloody know.
Bad form, seriously. (Isn’t it enough our lives are being reduced to a left and right argument already)
Personally I find the game concept freaking hilarious, not gonna pretend it doesn’t cover some complex ground though.
Bringing up games like South Park and God of War is a good start, but we all know it’s not as easy as that.
I’ll agree that he needs to be given clear guidelines by Twitch and leave it at that pretty much.
I’m pretty sure that Twitch (and other services) are fine with violence and soft porn content.. I’d be looking more to “the player can choose to have their “high school but not really *wink*” character shame other characters to the point where they commit suicide” – I’m sure I’ve read a couple of articles about real life cases where this happened on social media sites, and I’m pretty sure Twitch wouldn’t want to touch that can of worms with a very long barge pole.
I’m not super familiar with the variety of content available on Twitch, but I don’t recall God of War or South Park containing similar content. Maybe South Park does?
I’d assume the ban has something to do with the torture aspect of kids/teens, which to most will definitely be more taboo than torturing adults in GTAV (as is the example given in his video). Either that or the particular mechanic in the game where you can bully your victim to the point that they commit suicide. But then were these features around before the ban or introduced after it was already banned? I don’t know.
Even so, it’s still pretty shitty what Twitch has done. When the developer is so open to dialogue to get the game unbanned, yet cannot get a basic response is really poor form.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
There is an update to the Yandere Simulator dev’s video and apparently twitch reps responded to him.