The dungeon crawling RPG Criminal Girls 2: Party Favors has had various alterations made to its PlayStation Vita release, due to advice from the ESRB that, without edits, the title would be likely to receive an Adults Only rating.

These changes include the censorship of more than half of the Motivation artwork and the removal of all Motivation voices.

Steam titles do not require ESRB ratings, which makes an uncensored release of the upcoming Steam port a possibility. However, the publisher NIS America has previously stated that releasing unrated games goes against company policy.

Despite their current company policy, Prinny Supervisor, a localisation team member from NIS America's official forum, has expressed interest in gauging fan demand for an uncensored release.

They have specifically mentioned petitions, rather than forum comments, as the kind of quantitative data that they want to see, and has explicitly stated that there is still hope for an uncensored release:

"I will say again that I am trying to get as much weight as I can behind an argument for making an unrated, uncensored Criminal Girls 2 on Steam, but without surveys and sales numbers, there's little to go on. I did some cursory research and discovered for example that there are no thorough surveys/petitions for CG2 coming to Steam uncensored. Without something like that, all we really have to go on in terms of numbers are like...youtube comments. Which, y'know. Come on."

"There's hope in the sense that, technically, games on Steam don't need ratings. If it were to happen, we would basically just ignore the ESRB's rating entirely and specifically advertise that that the uncensored version (potentially) on Steam would be uncensored and unrated. As long as we don't use any of the same advertising material that we used for CG2 (ESRB has a hand in those things, that's why you see the ratings in advertisements), it should be possible. CG is already in the books, as it were (we announced that it was coming to Steam a while back and we've been constantly working it out), but CG2 has the slightest glimmer of an itty-bitty hope of coming to Steam uncensored, but that would require an exception to company policy and a very long meeting about budgets and scheduling, as has been stated. It's what I hope to see happen and will continue to advocate for until that last sliver of hope vanishes entirely. But keep in mind that this is entirely my personal opinion (as is everything else I post, but y'know), not NISA's official position. Do not quote it as such."

"I'm not saying that it would change something that's already been set in motion, but it would definitely be interesting. It's something I would like to see. And yes, it is more relevant than threads and posts on social media, if you look at it from the perspective of the person running the numbers. This guy's got a budget that he needs to assign to a particular project, and I very much doubt that showing him nasty comments accomplishes much: to him, that's a PR issue, not a budget issue. But, show that same guy some numbers that say "doing it this way will literally make this company more money than it would spend", that's an attention-grabber. That's something that's exponentially easier to demonstrate with a survey than with a comment on a message board."

"No, there's just a lot to consider. Feedback is crucial to a lot of things, and it's never ignored, in any form (even the stuff that's just objectively dumb). NIS sees and evaluates a lot of different kinds of feedback, including what we send them directly (I believe I posted earlier about how we might do feedback, but that could be in nichegamer's thread). But if you want something very specific to happen in a very specific project, and there are economic obstacles involved, a survey says a lot. It's another form of feedback, a way of demonstrating directly rather than figuratively how a specific decision has an economic impact. Again, valuable feedback, not something that's treated completely differently."

http://archive.is/Sd2rR

Note: To quote the localisation team member, their words are "in no way official or endorsed by NISA".

If you would like to support the game being free of censorship, please take a few seconds to sign this petition. Every signature goes a long way in the fight against censorship!