Nintendo Responds To Gay Marriage Petition

[Demon_Skeith]

Earlier this week, we helped publicize a fan-made petition that set out to get gay marriage support in the upcoming Nintendo game Tomodachi Life, which allows players to hang out and start relationships in a weird, surreal alternate universe habitated by Mii characters.

Nintendo has responded to that petition with a statement to the AP, and it's truly tone-deaf:

Nintendo never intended to make any form of social commentary with the launch of Tomodachi Life. The relationship options in the game represent a playful alternate world rather than a real-life simulation. We hope that all of our fans will see that 'Tomodachi Life' was intended to be a whimsical and quirky game, and that we were absolutely not trying to provide social commentary.

    The ability for same-sex relationships to occur in the game was not part of the original game that launched in Japan, and that game is made up of the same code that was used to localize it for other regions outside of Japan.

Of course, denying gay people the right to get married in a game about relationships and marriage is itself "social commentary."

Nintendo went on, according to the Associated Press:

    We have heard and thoughtfully considered all the responses. We will continue to listen and think about the feedback. We're using this as an opportunity to better understand our consumers and their expectations of us at all levels of the organization. We have been looking to broaden our approach to development whenever possible as we put all our energy into continuing to develop fun games that will surprise and delight players.

source

Do you think they responded right?

 

[VirusZero]

To a degree yes and no.
 
I think they are perfectly within their right to design a game however they want and that's the end of it. I mean not to be rude to LGBT groups but not every game is going to cater to them. They have to understand that. Just like there are games made that don't cater to me or you. I mean the unfortunate side of game development is that it is still a business and they need to watch how they spend their money in order to profit. They could have spend a lot of time and money to make LGBT relationships an actual feature (rather than a bug which threatened to break the game and thusly had to be removed)... But how much would have it had cost them versus how much they would make because of it.
 
And I have a bit of a hard time sympathizing with them here in this case because, as a gamer, I've played loads of characters I don't necessary identify with. I'll never be Samus Aran or Master Chief or Lara Croft or Nathan Drake. But that doesn't mean I can't play the games and enjoy them for what they are.
 
But I think if they would have just come out and said:
"We're sorry. The reason we didn't include this as a feature was because it was going to cost us $500,000 extra beyond our allotted budget and take 2 more months to build/test to include. And the amount of money we'd earn back wouldn't justify our cost to add that feature. It's not that we don't like LGBT people or anything like that, this was a pure business decision that the developers didn't really have any say in. We hope that you can enjoy the game anyway and that future iterations will answer your concerns."
 
It would have gone better rather than trying to play ti ff as just an innocent quirky little title not meant to be social commentary. (Because now people are assuming Nintendo is anti-LGBT because of it. Which may not be entirely true or entirely false.)

 

[Rez]

They could have worded it better but people are being stupid about it.  Besides they would have lost sales either way if they came out for or against doing it simply because of the issue at hand.  
They've lost a couple sales here and there because of it, but not as massive as it could have been so I suppose they did the best they could with what they could say. 

 

[Demon_Skeith]

I think they are against it for hentai reasons.

But they have said sorry for this and if there is another will allow it in the next game.

 

[Rez]

It was a good recovery. And understandable. It would have been impossible to recode and release it in june still.

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