The controversy surrounding Skullgirls continues to swell. After the update removing the Nazi references and the sexualization of the character of Filia, the game is destroyed.
The developers of Skullgirls 2nd Encore And Skullgirls Mobile would have done well without this huge controversy. The game, however, released in August 2013, almost 10 years to the day, found itself in the spotlight after the removal of content by the studio Hidden Variable Studios. Unfortunately, as often in this kind of case, some of the players express their dissatisfaction in an extremely virulent and harmful way to the game as well as to the developers.
Skullgirls gets destroyed by players after its update
Last week, Hidden Variable Studios made a lot of changes to Skullgirls 2nd Againultimate version of Skullgirls published in 2012, “to better reflect its values” via a content update. On its official website, the studio indicates that it has removed Nazi references to the Black Egrets group from the game, whose members all wore a red armband with a black and white logo in the middle and a flag in the same colors. Another change to the game concerns the character of Filia, whose skirt has been extended by a few centimeters to conceal her underwear. The character’s story mode introductory scene, in which a middle-aged man is seen laying his hands on the 16-year-old girl, was also removed. Modifications that did not please some players at all, who let it be known in a virulent way.
On Steam, negative reviews are raining down on the 2D fighting game. While the overall reviews of the title are rather positive, the most recent ones turn red, in the “rather negative” category. The evaluation of Skullgirls 2nd Again even went through the “extremely negative” box before players in turn tried to compensate for these bad ratings by leaving positive reviews. Part of the public cries out for censorship after the update…and demands word for word that Filia’s underwear be visible again.
For a user, “puritan censorship is a disgrace“. According to another, we are going squarely towards “the death of artistic freedom“whereas when others explain that they don’t like the review bombing…but they do it anyway. “It’s to protect a game that I love“, justifies one of the players. Behaviors that are painful to see (and lunar justifications), but which unfortunately reproduce more and more often, undermining the work of the development studios, for which the Steam and Metacritic evaluations are essential.
A game that is not at its first controversy
Before this controversy, Skullgirls had already found itself in turmoil because of Mike Zaimont, lead designer of the title at Lab Studio Games, the original developer of the fighting game. In June 2020, during a tournament organized around the game, the man had referred to the death of George Floyd in the middle of the game, live on Twitch, with his sentence “I can’t breathe” (I can’t breathe), two weeks after the death of the American.
Remarks which followed accusations of sexual harassment and racism on the part of its employees and people outside the studio. After a wave of departures, Mike Zaimont had laid off his last employees in September 2020, citing financial difficulties to justify his decision. Following the disappearance of Lab Studio Games, Hidden Variable Studios, already in charge of the development of Skullgirls Mobilehad regained control of Skullgirls 2nd Encore.