A giant “controversy” erupted on gaming Twitter over the last twenty-four hours about Dispatch, a non-game called a superhero visual novel, where the developers stated they removed sex scenes due to budgetary constraints and now wish they hadn’t because of customer reactions. It’s another bizarre point in this year’s culture war spread by both the mainstream gaming media like Kotaku, combined with a group calling itself “gooners” who don’t seem to care much about gaming, but rather slobering over graphical representations of women and playing out romance fantasies online.
There’s a lot to unpack for the normal person who hasn’t followed along on how gaming culture completely collapsed in 2025. Last year, customers rose up against social justice permeating AAA video games like Assassin’s Creed: Shadows and Dragon Age: The Veilguard in what seemed a very obvious fight to get corporations to stop pushing their DEI agendas.
In early 2025, social media algorithms began to clamp down on “anti-woke” content as platforms like YouTube realized that the upswell in the culture war likely influenced the 2024 election of Donald Trump. They wanted this to go away, and many influencers who had been fighting these types of things shifted their content as a result to ride the algorithm and maintain their audience.
People quickly found with games like Stellar Blade that talking about half-naked women was something the algorithm promoted. And so the message changed to “we oppose censorship,” and by “censorship,” it means they want to pressure game developers into making women as naked as possible. Political suppression—real censorship—like the YouTube algorithm was not something they wanted to discuss, as a lot of the influencer networks thrive on faking success, and so even while their views were being cut in half by being identified, as happened across the board, they didn’t want to mention it.
