A fighting game with over 10 years of history skull girls More than 600 denials in just 24 hours, according to the developers, mainly due to the patch adjusting or removing artwork that they claim doesn’t reflect their “values” and “broad vision” for the game’s future. A Steam review was received. Skullgirls still has an overall Steam rating of “Very Positive”, although the recent review average has dropped to “Mostly Negative”.
The Skullgirls content and revision update is rolling out on June 26th and will affect PC, console, and mobile versions of the game. The changes are summarized below. forum post Developed by game director Charlie Price, it targets three aspects of Skullgirls.
- “Allusions to real-world hate groups” seen in Skullgirls’ Black Heron Legion clothing and iconography, especially the Nazi-like red armbands
- Pay attention to instances where characters are “fetishized and/or sexualized”, especially younger characters
- Some content that “seems to be in bad taste” regarding race
Some of the adjustments only affected the artwork seen in the gallery, removing 4 pieces of fan art and changing 15 official illustrations, but there were also many adjustments to the in-game animations and story mode art. Added. For example, Black Heron armbands have been removed from everywhere, as well as the story mode illustration of a big band of black characters being beaten by the police.
Some non-artwork has also changed. The “Soviet Announcer” voice pack has been removed (there could be several reasons for this, it’s not clear which one). Also, the combo counter phrase for the 18-hit combo has been removed. What was previously “barely legal” has been replaced. The full changelog is found hereand from the video below Lalit TV Record changes in art in a before-and-after comparison.
Changes are often so small that they are hard to notice unless pointed out. For example, some illustrations were tweaked to hide characters’ underwear without materially changing the sexual content of the scene.
In explaining the tweaks, Price suggested that Skullgirls’ core identity hasn’t changed, stating, for example, “Skullgirls is used to characters who confidently express their sexuality.” said the changes made with racial sensitivity in mind were not affected. Playful references to pulpy themes” feel the developers “respectfully allude to certain stereotypes”.
Many of the negative reviews on Steam complained that even the smallest changes were a form of censorship, some of which were waking and hallucinogenic. Others have also noted that Skullgirls was crowdfunded and complained that whatever the justification for the change was, it was retroactively changed because the game they paid for was unacceptable.
“The current devs (not the original dev team from 10+ years ago) are changing what has been working perfectly for 10+ years and removing ‘offensive’ elements like armbands and armbands. , thought the game’s sprites needed to run through 4Kids-style censorship.Panty shots for reasons only they know and for moral reasons,” someone recently wrote Steam reviewer.
As that review alludes to, Skullgirls has a storied history of development. The original studio, Lab Zero, fired all the studio staff after lead designer Mike Zaimont publicly joked about the murder of George Floyd and was subsequently accused of workplace misconduct. collapsed in Skullgirls is currently maintained by Hidden Variable, the studio that created his port of Mobile, and a studio called Future Club, founded by former Lab Zero developers. Mr. Zaimont is no longer involved with his Skullgirls and has been working as a programmer for another game for the past two years.
The developers of Hidden Variable and Future Club anticipate a backlash to this patch and will not comment further on the changes.
“Of course, we are aware that some members of the Skullgirls community may disagree with these changes. It’s about whether it’s an issue that deserves to be addressed,” Price writes in his book. forum post. “Please be advised that all of these choices have been made after careful consideration and lengthy discussion by all members of our current development team. Beyond this post, we intend to discuss the details of these changes further. there is no.”
This isn’t all backlash, as many Skullgirls players are now taking advantage of Steam’s review section, wide-eyed by the flood of complaints, and calling review bombers short-playing Astroturfers or themselves. accused of being too libido for the benefit of the public, or both.
“I’m leaving this positive review to counter people at 5 Hours who said the whole game was ruined by being 1% less horny,” it wrote. 1 reviewer People with more than 2,000 hours of game play time.
At the time of writing, 169 positive Steam reviews and 659 negative Steam reviews have been posted since June 26th.
