In an interview with IGN Australia, Dead Space executive producer Glen Schofield has confirmed that the title has been banned in Japan, and hints at difficulties in Germany and Korea as well. The Australian version will arrive uncut.
Last week, community manager Ben Swanson revealed that Dead Space had been banned in Germany, China and Japan. We felt odd reporting information from ostensibly reliable sources as rumor, but the concerns over at GamePolitics last week were compelling enough that we did just that. But though a community manager may not have been able to convince us, we find it hard to disregard the words of the game’s executive producer:
IGN: Dead Space has been banned in a handful of nations now. Did you have any issues getting the game through the stringent Australian Classification Board?
Glen Schofield: Australia is getting the full, complete version. No cuts. We’re not softening it for anybody. You know, I think a part of it was – he’s not a killer. He’s killing aliens and that’s why we thought for a while we’d get it through in Germany. And they were like ‘well, the fact that he can get dismembered pretty grotesquely is bad, so…’ We thought it was cool.
IGN: And Japan banned it?
Glen Schofield: Japan too. Korea thought they would get it, but we haven’t heard back yet.
Knowing that some will still harbor doubts, we contacted EA early this afternoon for final confirmation, but were told only that an official response was not yet available. We will update this story if or when confirmation arrives.
Speaking to GamePolitics, Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter provided the opinion that such a ban would be “no big deal” for EA, given the likely small market for EA’s titles in Japan and the lack of console sales in China. He believes that the German version might be edited in order to grant approval.
In May, Niko Partners told GameCyte that though consoles were technically illegal in China, they are readily available in the grey market… so the Chinese gamer may, perhaps, have a workaround if they too wish to be violently dismembered like the game’s protagonist.
0 Comments For This Post
2 Trackbacks For This Post
September 15th, 2008 at 3:13 am
[...] GameCyte now has a post in which Dead Space executive producer Glen Schofield (see him hyping the game’s violence level at E3) says that the game has indeed been banned in Japan and "hints at difficulties in Germany and Korea as well…" [...]
September 15th, 2008 at 5:59 am
[...] GameCyte now has a post in which Dead Space executive producer Glen Schofield (see him hyping the game’s violence level at E3) says that the game has indeed been banned in Japan and "hints at difficulties in Germany and Korea as well…" [...]
Leave a Reply