Play-Asia Will Sell Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 for Western Audiences, to Spite Feminists, or Something
Even people who know nothing about fighting games know about the Dead Or Alive series. In fact, people who know nothing about fighting games tend to only know about the Dead Or Alive series, in my anecdotal experience.
Whenever I tell people I like fighting games, I feel like I have to waste a lot of time explaining that, yes, I know the camera zooms in on female characters’ boobs and butts a lot, and no, I don’t like it either, but fighting games can be entertaining in spite of those elements. Dead Or Alive is one of the worst offenders when it comes to this sort of thing, and you don’t need an expert to tell you that, because you probably already know just from doing a Google-image search of “Dead or Alive.” Did you know that the game actually has male characters in it? It does! More than one, even! Not that a layperson would ever know that, since they’re almost never talked about or pictured.
The Dead Or Alive developers know about their reputation, too—since it’s intentional, and all. They also know that the fandom for Dead Or Alive is pretty small here in the West—it’s not a very compelling game from a mechanical standpoint. Arguably, the gameplay is not the reason why most people would pick it up, which would explain why it’s not very interesting. It’s not terrible, mind you—but it’s not as interesting a fighting game as your Street Fighters and your Tekkens, and as a result, the DOA competitive community just isn’t that big. It doesn’t feature first at EVO or anything, and it’s not going to any time soon. As a result, I wasn’t too surprised to hear that Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 wouldn’t be made available here in America, ’cause it’s just not that popular here. But, that’s not exactly the reason that the game developers provided.
When asked why the game wouldn’t appear here in the States, publisher Koei Tecmo said, “We do not bring DOAX3 to the west and won’t have any plan change in the future … 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.”
How do you think Dead Or Alive fans reacted to this? Oh, you know. Poorly.
Anyway, game retailer Play-Asia has decided to seize this opportunity to capitalize on DOA‘s anti-feminist audience and they’ve announced that they’ll be selling DOAX3 to Westerners. Play-Asia also sent out a bunch of tweets about how they’re doing it just to spite all those pesky SJWs. I mean, I guess that sort of trolling will work pretty well on sexist guys who think that feminists hate boobs and want to cover up every boob in every video game. Which does seem to be what everyone thinks feminism is all about.
This entire topic is just exhausting, honestly, so let’s just share our favorite facepalm gifs and try not to think about how stupid and disappointing this repetitive, boring argument is. The people who want to buy Dead Or Alive will buy it. No one is censoring boobs. The people who don’t want to buy Dead or Alive were already going to not buy it, so it’s not like that’s going to change, either. No one is censoring boobs. Also, none of you know what “censorship” is.
Video games … video games never change.
(Top image via Aaron Misaki Custom Wallpapers)
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