MangaGamer has apparently removed their upcoming game Suck my dick or die! and one of their current games, My sex slave is a classmate, from their lineup. One of our readers reports that the latter is still available for download to customers who purchased the game. This may be a reaction to new regulations concerning sexual violence coming from EOCS, a self-regulating consortium of adult game production companies in Japan.
The EOCS (Ethics Organization of Computer Software), often referred to as sofurin in Japan, mandates a set of guidelines that all member companies must follow. EOCS and CSA are the two main organizations that dictate guidelines for adult software in Japan. In the past, the EOCS has enforced guidelines regarding incest and sexual activity with unambiguously underaged characters. This recent set of regulations restricting the use of rape in adult games came in response to mounting pressure from the government and human rights organizations regarding sexual violence in eroge.
What sparked this recent set of events was the availability of a rape simulation game on Amazon’s UK site, prompting female rights group Equality Now to act to prohibit the sale of such games. ILLUSION, the game company behind the rape simulator, eventually removed the product from its website. However, this controversy has caused people both in Japan and outside Japan to take a closer look at sexual violence in eroge and put pressure on the game makers.
MangaGamer’s apparent response to the new EOCS regulations (which are not clear at the moment, as they are not public yet) was to remove two of its titles. Suck my dick or die!’s Japanese title has the word “rape” in it, and My sex slave is a classmate involves “training” girls as if they were pets, and this topic has supposedly been declared taboo by the EOCS according to some reports on the Japanese message board 2ch. Both of these games were published in Japan under the brand Liquid, which is one of NEXTON’s software brands. MangaGamer, although not a Japanese company, is controlled mainly by Japanese eroge companies, one of which may be NEXTON, due to the large quantity of their titles in MangaGamer’s lineup. The head of NEXTON also happens to be the current head of the EOCS.
UPDATE: MangaGamer has now issued an official statement on their site regarding the pulled titles, but there is no official word yet on continued availability to customers who have already purchased the games:
04 Jun 2009
We are sorry to announce that the following two titles will be put off from the site due to a request from the copyright holder.
“My Sex Slave is a Classmate”
“Suck My Dick or Die”
We sincerely apologize for the inconvinience this might have caused.
