Playtesting, Censorship, and Authenticity
I have seen some backlash against Stellar Blade for "caving to censorship". This could probably have been avoided if the developer hadn't previously made full-throated promises about his artistic vision, and if the marketing campaign hadn't released promotional images of costumes the the game. When Stellar Blade finally had to tone down some of the nudity for age ratings and console approval, some audience said they felt cheated.
I don't know how much of this outrage was real, and how much was political posturing. Probably a lot.
This happens all the time. A game is re-released, or re-mastered, the developers have to remove or tone down the edge of parts of the game that was completely fine and unremarkable when the game was released. It happened with Skullgirls, and even with certain cards in Hearthstone. In the case of Skullgirls, the backlash was kind of predictable, because Skullgirls was hardly unremarkable back then. On the one hand, because they originally crossed the line twice, the retroactive censorship wasn't unexpected. On the other hand, half the the point of the game was that it was edgy and anime and looked like it was made by Japanese people who didn't understand what you can and can't say in Europe and North America. It wasn't just gratuitous Nazis and panties, but gratuitously gratuitous Nazis and panties. It's not my cup of tea, as a player or as a developer, but I completely understand what they were going for. In the case of Hearthstone, the removal of the Succubus card/character was in all likelihood due to Chinese censorship, about age ratings on one app store or another, and then they just decided it would be easier to justify and draw less attention if they removed the card/character everywhere around the world, and it would be more profitable this way than if they made the game ages 16 and up in some parts of the world.
There have been multiple instances of politically motivated outrage against games that had hired a narrative design consultancy firm, sometimes fuelled by short, out-of-context clips of activists from these firms bragging how they managed to change the tone and direction of the game despite resistance from the developers, or explaining how they managed to influence management to hire a consultancy firm against the will of the core team.
All this taken together forms a narrative: Outside forces are deliberately pushing designers, developers, art directors, and lead writers to abandon or water down their creative vision.
I think that's misguided for two reasons: First, I think the developers of indie games are either themselves trying to make their games palatable for mass audiences, and they themselves are responsible for the political messaging or general vibes of their work. Second, game design is full of compromise. About that first point: ZA/UM were not secretly pressured manipulated to add in a bunch of politics into Disco Elysium. Concerned Ape was not browbeaten into removing realistic gore and nudity from Stardew Valley. A lot of the time, most of the time, what you see is the artistic vision of the developers, or their political stance. There is no need to conjure up conspiracies. Maybe the remaining Skullgirls developers just have gotten older and don't feel the same way about shock value like they used to.
Most indie games do not self-censor, but I would not be surprised to learn that the more popular and mainstream a game is, or the more popular a game becomes, the more likely the developers are to self-censor. This is because "true artists" that ruthlessly follow a creative vision are usually niche oddities you can download for free (itch is full of them), but also due to the dynamics of indie success. When games develop something of a following and commercial success, so that their developers keep on expanding and iterating on the game, they become more conservative. Just imagine you decide to keep working on a free game of yours that blew up, for financial reasons, instead of working on the next niche thing. If you make this decision, you are probably already motivated by growing your audience, and more likely to self-censor.
This "conservative" approach to game development is usually not about avoiding sex, violence, religion, and politics, of course. It's about making the game easier, avoiding difficult puzzles, complicated narratives, niche literary references, and all kinds of mechanics that could limit your audience. Instead of removing unpalatable elements from a game in the end, you decide to pursue mass appeal early on, and reorient your whole design around that from the ground up. I mean, if you could choose, would you rather develop the next Lunacid or the next Among Us, the next Passage, or the next Vampire Survivors?
I fear if you are following me, you will probably decide to go the starving artist route.
The second reason why you shouldn't worry that much about outside forces influencing games also has to do with game development, but less with marketing. It's fundamental to the way game design works.
Re-makes and re-releases are unusual in this regard. Most of the time, you don't see a fully formed game like Skullgirls that you can compare with a re-release, or Final Fantasy VII, or Silent Hill 2. Most of the time, you only see the final product, and perhaps, if the marketing campaign screwed up, you realise that the final product differs from the promotional material (as was the case with Watch_Dogs or No Man's Sky).
Most of the time, you don't see all the content that was developed and doesn't make it into the game. If you did, you would realise that games usually are not born out of the head of their creator fully formed and armed like Athena from the head of Zeus. Most games are developed iteratively, and although the core of the game is fixed, most mechanics, plot points, levels, and characters are subject to change. Often you only see how well something works once you implement it and try it out.
And then, you only really see how well it actually works when you let somebody playtest it. The clunkiest game mechanics and the most obtuse puzzles feel fine to you if you were the one who thought about them. The worst writing and the most convoluted plots will feel elegant because you wrote them. The only way to see what works is playtesting.
Being "true to your artistic vision" from start to finish is pretty much impossible. If you work together with people, you will struggle to communicate your ideas. This is why big productions resort to mood-boards and all kinds of adjacent junk in their production bibles, why AAA games produce so much concept art, and why games often feel like they are ripping off existing work. It's really hard to communicate to your team that you want to make a game with a certain feeling if that game does not yet exist, but it's easy to communicate that you want a game "like Doom 3" or "like Metroid Prime" or "like Proteus".
If you actually manage to communicate your artistic vision to your team down to the precise minutiae, you will hamstring your artists. You have those artists working with you so you can worry about the big picture stuff while they work on the art part. If you are rigid about your own creative vision, you leave other people no space for creativity, no space to express themselves, no leeway to make creative or design decisions.
And after all that, everything must be playtested, even the big-picture mood stuff, to see if the mood actually comes across when the players aren't already primed by the concept art and the design document and weeks of meetings. If the player doesn't know he is supposed to feel a certain mood, does the game still work?
Both the Skullgirls situation and the Stellar Blade situation are unusual, because the the tone of Skullgirls was edgy on purpose, and Skullgirls concept art had been released in 2012, and the designer of Stellar Blade had already promised not to censor all the eye candy. I think the backlash to Stellar Blade was overblown and politically motivated, and the part of the backlash to the Skullgirls re-release about sanitising their decade old concept art had a point, barely.
If you are making your own game you will quickly notice all the compromises you have to make your game, or maybe you just don't release any concept art or in-progress screenshots, maybe you don't work with other people, maybe you don't even play-test, and just upload a finished game to itch.io without ever reading the comments, like a true artist.
Once you understand that, you will understand that there is a solid core to every game design that you won't compromise on, and a surrounding malleable blob that you want to re-shape and negotiate in order to preserve the core. When you get playtesting feedback that tells you to replace the core with something else, you try to re-shape that blob in order to make the core work. When an idea of yours is not feasible, you compromise to preserve the spirit. If you are making a real-time strategy game, and somebody tells you to make it turn-based, you might ignore them, or you might entertain this feedback. It all depends on whether your core artistic vision is "real time" or "flanking the enemy and using the terrain" or "logistics and intelligence in 19th century land warfare".
The people who are the most rigid about game design are usually teenagers just learning to program. They bite off more than they can chew, and they are completely unwilling to reduce their scope. They are unable to execute on their vision in terms of development skill, unable to understand the consequences of their design choices.
If you are unable to compromise on your artistic vision, you are unlikely to realise it.
