While surfing the Fuwanovel forums today I came across a curious post. This post was from user Sanahtlig claiming that Nutaku was using a DMCA complaint to hide their censorship. This took me by surprise since Nutaku had just announced funding for adult game projects for their store front that wanted to be the Steam for adult games, so I decided to reach to their PR for some answers.
On the DMCA claim I was told one of their reviewers came across the copyrighted images from a DMM game, and they sent a polite take down notice, since these files are to be used for reviews purposes only. They issued this statement to me via email on this issue:
“Nutaku recognizes the importance of “fair use” and will never misuse DMCA to silence critics – those tactics are completely contrary to our mission as a company. That said, we are obliged to attempt to protect the artwork of our Japanese partners from commercial reuse as part of our localization agreement.”
I was much more interested in if the censorship claims were true, and in fact they confirmed that they are. They actually did this in a Reddit post a while ago. These changes stemmed from working with payment processors on certain early browser games. They also made a blog post that went into some more detail about this a short time back. Needless to say community was not happy with these changes and I was told by PR that Nutaku has since worked hard to keep their current browser titles free from censorship and the previous Reddit post says most of the changes to the older titles have been reverted. Here is a quote directly from my email response from PR:
“Fan reaction to censorship is abysmal – which is why we made the commitment that we would never host a censored game on our downloadable store, nor ask a developer to change their work for it. We’re sticking with that.” He went on to say about the browser titles, “I’m happy to say that there hasn’t been any censorship in the last several months of browser game releases and we’re hoping to keep it that way.”
While I think it is great they are working hard to keep the censorship out of the browser games now, and have vowed no censorship whatsoever on the downloadable titles. I feel they should let users know which titles on the site currently still have censored content. If someone is going to spend time and money to play one of their browser games they should know if that experience has been altered or not. I think they have a bright future if they stick to their guns and the adult gaming market will vastly benefit from them being a part of it.
