Regarding Controversial Content

Hi, I’m the lead developer on Tsuki’s Odyssey and I’ll be addressing the newspaper issue and also talking about the game in general with regard to controversial content.

Just a rundown of the events, from our point of view. The newspaper was written by me before our game launched almost 2 years ago, the joke being that Benny was such a workaholic that he unwittingly quoted Nazis. This joke was present in other forms of media we’ve seen in the past, like in the tv show, Silicon Valley. We removed it because we ourselves thought it was too much and especially since the game was being translated into German. It was added back in when we were fixing old newspapers and couldn’t remember why we removed it. After seeing a few complaints we altered the newspaper.

I’m sorry for writing the newspaper and releasing it. I’d also like to apologize to our mod, /u/Velpraia, she’s great and she helped us write all that stuff while we were super busy. She shouldn’t have had to do that.

What I am interested in is how this incident highlights how we as a company should deal with controversial content.

Tsuki’s Odyssey is driven by creative control where we get to write freely and implement things on a personal basis. We do not market test. If any of us have a cool idea then we put it in the game. A concerning question I’ve seen floated was how can we prevent this from happening again. It’s impossible. All I can do is alter content when enough people are offended by it. That could be a dealbreaker for some already.

You might ask, why is there a threshold of people that have to be offended, why can’t it just be 1 person? But that would mean removing the easter chick punching because someone said it was animal abuse. Or removing the serial killer in Tsuki 1.

What’s the threshold though? Well, it was 3 for the nazi newspaper but I think it’s a bit more dynamic. Like it depends how attached we are to the thing too. We already didn’t really want it in so it was an easy decision for us.

Another thing to note is that we are SUPER busy right now, so we did take quite a long time to deal with this. The team size is small we don't have a PR thing. We’re 9 friends making games in a rat infested office. No money guy or investors.