German Game Ban Just Screwed Over Switch Players On Several Other Continents

Dying Light: Platinum Edition launched on Nintendo Switch today, but due to an extremely peculiar Germany-specific ban, the digital version of the game is unavailable to players in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

A few pieces of information need to be pulled together to make sense of this odd situation. First, you need to know that until very recently, Germany had a long history of banning violent video games that were otherwise sold around the world. Second, you need to know that Nintendo’s European base is in Germany, so it’s from there that all European (and seemingly Australian and New Zealand) purchases are made.

Dying Light was banned in Germany in 2015, due to the country’s extremely draconian approach to bloody content in games. This has long been an issue there. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, to release a violent video game in Germany, developers would have to take bizarre steps like replacing all red blood with green pixels. As a superb article on GI.biz broke down last year, this was all thanks to the Youth Protection Laws that made Germany’s ratings some of the strictest outside of China.

Recently those laws have been eased. Even games like Wolfenstein have been cleared for release in Germany, where once any depiction of Nazis would torpedo any chance of it being sold. But Dying Light’s brutality was caught up before those changes, and so the game was never allowed to be released there.

Read the full article on Kotaku