In an interview with 4Gamer Shuhei Yoshida, the worldwide studios president for Sony Computer Entertainment, was questioned about a number of different topics. 4Gamer went for the money shot by bringing up the difference between the East and West, and how the cultural differences prevented the release of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 coming to America and Europe. Yoshida responded by saying that the Western media’s fascination with female gender politics was a “difficult problem”.

Niche Gamer caught wind of the 4Gamer interview and had help in translating the relevant parts by Twitter user Mombot and a certain Claude Smith.

The interview mostly centered around the PlayStation 4’s upcoming PlayStation VR headset, and some of the games and themes that Sony will focus on with the device. However, they did discuss Koei Tecmo’s decision to avoid releasing Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 in the West, forcing Americans and Europeans to have to import the game from sites like Play-Asia.com. Yoshida responded stating…

“It’s due to cultural differences. The West has it’s own thinking about how to depict women in games media which is different from Japan […] Speaking personally, if it is a representation acceptable to the general people in Japan, I wouldn’t be concerned about it in Japan. It’s a difficult problem.” “I loved Dragon’s Crown, but that title got some criticism. And it got extremely low points in [some] reviews.”

[Editor’s note: Shuhei Yoshida clarified on Twitter that part of his quote was lost in translation, but he only meant some of the reviews and not all]

This mirrors what the community manager from Koei Tecmo stated as the reasoning for the publisher not releasing Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 in the West. His exact words were…

“Do you know many issues happening in video game industry with regard to how to treat female in video game industry? We do not want to talk those things here. But certainly we have gone through in last year or two to come to our decision. Thank you.”

Gamers have become increasingly angry about the censorship running rampant in the gaming industry especially in the past couple of months, even though technically it’s been happening for decades.

In an editorial by Kotaku, localizer Alex Smith explained that the reason some of the content is altered is to avoid offending the cultural sensibilities of those in the West, explaining to the Gawker-owned outlet…

“Something intended to be simply humorous or risqué in a Japanese game might come across to an American gamer as creepy or worse, as pedophilia,” “Keeping the problematic content in there with the intent of preserving the creator’s original vision is misguided, because the creator presumably didn’t intend for the audience to feel uncomfortable or offended. The original vision is better served by making adjustments so the new audience appreciates the work on (as closely as possible) the same terms as the original audience.”

That “problematic content” has been removed from Mature rated games such as Blade & Soul and has even affected titles like TERA Online. More recently companies like Idea Factory International and Koei Tecmo have just avoided releasing some games in the West to forfeit the cost of censoring them or drastically altering content.

Gamers have decided to react by using the hashtag #1millionGamersStrong and signing a petition in hopes of getting developers to stop censoring their games for the West.

The Kotaku piece attempts to state that there was no “backlash” or “organized attacks” against Koei Tecmo releasing Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 for the PS4 and PS Vita, but Play-Asia’s Twitter feed said otherwise.

That’s also not to mention that Kotaku’s own Jason Schreier tried shaming the developers of Dragon’s Crown – one of Shuhei Yoshida’s favorite games – into wanting the females to be better proportioned and covered up… according to Western standards.

Nevertheless, even in announcing that Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 wasn’t coming to the West, various agenda-oriented media outlets had already attached the gender politics debate to the topic at hand, with sites like Metro calling the game series “Rubbish” and Mary Sue saying Play-Asia’s tactic of luring in customers was aimed at “sexist guys”.

In an attempt to not prove that the media has been attacking games on sexism, the wording and tone of the articles reporting on the Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 issue tried focusing on the sales topic and not the gender politics.

Of course, the evidence is amply available from the previous year alone, well before gamers started saying that the SJWs were to blame. Picking up from rhetoric used by popular cultural critics, we had articles from Cracked and IBTimes calling Koei Tecmo’s series one of the most “sexist games” of all times. Uzerfriendly called the Dead or Alive Xtreme games “sexist” and “demeaning”. Games Retrospect listed Dead or Alive Xtreme as the number one most misogynistic series in gaming. All of those articles have been published within the last two years and on the first two pages of Google.

It’s kind of hard to deny that there isn’t an issue when it comes to gender politics and gaming in the Western media, especially when the evidence is just a Google search away.