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Import specialist Play Asia has chosen to use a pro-GamerGate anti-equality hashtag in its response to this morning’s Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 news.
Developer Team Ninja said earlier that the game won’t be heading to the West due to fear of a backlash over the game’s representation of women.
We do not bring DOAX3 to the west and won’t have any plan change in the future,” a Facebook response explained. 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.”
Now retailer Play Asia has used the #SJW hashtag in a string of tweets lambasting the decision. SJW stands for ‘Social Justice Warrior’ which astonishingly is used as an insult among GamerGate backers, as they do not believe in the notion of equality and have a hostile attitude towards females.
#DOAX3 will not be coming to the US due to #SJW nonsense,” Play Asia said. However, we will have the English Asia version available. This is literally the worst boycott we’ve ever seen.”
A later tweet added: We don’t advocate harassing individuals. Keep it civil everyone, we’re talking about video games here.”
Then another: We would never forget about boobs. Tits are life, ass is hometown.”
As you can imagine, Team Ninja is coming in for a rough time on Facebook where users are throwing all sorts of accusations at it. In the most literate and balanced way possible, of course.
Comments include:
"No USA Release =’s NO SALE then! Also if brought to USA DO NOT REPEAT DO NOT CENSOR This GAME! That also =’s NO SALE if CENSORED!!!"
"I’m so fucking angry you can’t even imagine that the people who don’t even play video games are responsible for this very video game coming out to western shores. Holy shit I’m so angry."
"You are making a terrible mistake, guys. If you refuse to release this game over in the West, you are surrendering your freedom of expression to the people who hate you, and would never have bought the game anyway. You need to understand that you have a core audience who will LITERALLY THROW MONEY AT YOU to get this game, because THEY are the ones who have supported you for all these years."
"Do NOT give in to these people! They are nothing but a whiny vocal minority and they are NEVER satisfied. They are destroying our culture because they’re too stupid to understand it. Release this game, release it untouched, and let them cry to Mamma."
"This is how WEAK Koei/Tecmo has become. Self-censorship due to PEOPLE THAT AREN’T EVEN CUSTOMERS. Can we just cut Koei/Tecmo off from the internet? Create a DNS block on them and spread it around to everyone’s routes? Cowardly companies like this don’t need to be on the internet, at all. And yes, I *WAS* a Customer, starting all the way back to Ninja Gaiden and Tecmo Bowl on the original NES. I am no longer a Tecmo customer after this. Coward companies have no business existing in my games library."
On a similar theme, like-minded young gamers have also taken to Change.org to add to the noble quest for Assassin’s Creed hoods with calls for Nintendo to reinstate mostly naked 13 year-olds to upcoming Wii U title Xenoblade Chronicles X.
To quote the campaign verbatim (although the bold is our own): Lyn is a character in a future video game called Xenoblade Chronicles X and her age is being censored from a 13 year-old to a 15 year-old because of a bikini that she can wear but there are 13 year-old girls in real life that wear bikinis and that’s fine but when a virtual 13 year-old girl wears a bikini that’s not fine and Lyn being 13 is part of the creators vision and if they censor Lyn they will censor the creators vision and is she is being censored because of pedophil stuff then that doesn’t make sense because 15 year-olds are still underaged in most countries and that is why you should sign this petition.”
The campaign currently has 31 supporters. Incidentally, the Assassin’s Creed hood campaign has a pretty respectable 1,530 supporters.
