The Stellar Blade Censorship Drama

Small chat on stream about the Stellar Blade Sony Shift Up Censorship drama that happened recently.
* I am not a game developer so I look at if from my field which is Business and Finance and speculate on what could have led to it *
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[@razzzumist]

I wanted to find out why there is censorship in Stellar Blade and eventually became a businessman.

[@Tsuki312]

My bussniess major coming in clutch once again 😏

[@haru_takahashi24]

Thnx for sharing ur view on this

[@aresrivera9744]

My question is, why did you bring up ratings? It’s an M rated game . Those games can have bear sex (balder gate three) in it and it’s OK.
As for the government, why not make that for that specific country government? And issue an apology say that it was done because of it legal issues and they’ll it should refund if needed
Unless you’re trying to say that a person from one of those factors has a vendetta against stellar Blade. I’m just generally confused about this.
Also the CEO is acting under a NDA as we can clearly see from his lying that “ it was always the final product”. Even a lawyer pointed that out.

[@Allyane_AK]

First and foremost my video (and anyone who talks on this topic as we have no internal documents as of writing this comment) is speculation based on my own expertise which is how Business and Financial decisions are made.
I am looking solely from what could have cause the decision in the first place while keeping politics and ideology outside of the debate.
Assuming the approval process of Sony wasn't so unusually slow that they gave their approval/disapproval AFTER the demo was out, which according to a friend that works in the games industry is unlikely as it's in house for Shift Up, the only other thing that could influence the decision are external factors.
Sony has the opposite of an incentive to hurt their product as they paid a pretty penny for an exclusive. So that left external factors to those two that could cause an executive decision: Rating Agencies & Government bodies.
While the game is rated Mature, that would be 17+ and there is an additional rating above that, Adult (18+), I have observed personally that using other games ratings is not a good comparison often as the ratings sometimes WILDLY vary (Blue Archive is rated 17+ while Goddess of Victory Nikke is rated 12+ for example).
So that was one of the two speculations.
If it's not Ratings the other speculation I had was Government bodies that supervise what they think is Ok and isn't in a similar vein to rating agencies.
While it is possible for people in those agencies to have a vendetta due to the controversies surrounding it, I am not assuming any of that sort, simply that they specifically did not like certain elements and the censorship that resulted was essentially a compromise with them.
The NDA is a non factor here as we are talking about what LED to the decision rather than the damage control AFTER the decision.
All in all I am trying to take a reasonable approach in speculating as to what could have led to that top down decision from a business perspective only.

[@aresrivera9744]

@@Allyane_AK thank you I was just trying understand.

[@Allyane_AK]

@@aresrivera9744 no worries i figured my explanation on stream may have been lacking haha

[@azradun3903]

"Conspiracy theories", oh right. It's not as if the gaming journos tried very hard to criticize the game.
And not as if Sony is a California company now.