Skullgirls players flipped out last week when an update removed panty shots, sexualisation of a minor, and Nazi iconography. And in the wake of that update, thousands of fans have flocked to the Steam page to review bomb 2nd Encore, dragging its score down to "Mostly Negative".
"The game has been out for years and [the] updates are slow," Mr. Serious posted. "In spite of that, they literally made an update to remove everything they deemed offensive, without even any options to keep or change the original art." The original art being a grown man groping a 16-year-old, naturally.
"Don't censor 10-year-old content to suit someone's crazy political views," ShapKees said. Those "crazy political views" are that sexualising minors and Nazis is a bit weird. Others say they "miss when this game was just about sexy girls fighting", some compare it to 1984, and of course, no review bombing in 2023 is complete without people crying "woke". Plenty of the reviews are demanding a refund or for the old content to return, arguing that the "censorship" removed key components of the game that inspired them to buy it.
Initially, the review bombing campaign brought the score down to "Overwhelmingly Negative", but it has slowly risen to "Mostly Negative". Many fans are urging others to leave positive reviews to continue to offset the flood of discouraging scores which are riddled with factual errors about what happened to the studio behind the game and why changes were made. The general sentiment you'd get from the Steam page is that there was a corporate takeover that led to all the original devs being fired before the new 'woke' crew went trigger-happy on censoring old content. That's not the case.
Three years ago, accusations were levied against Skullgirls lead designer Mike Zaimont of sexual harassment. He also faced backlash for making a racially insensitive "I can't breathe" joke during a tournament, which he claims was to raise awareness for Black Lives Matter. Several devs quit due to his behaviour, the allegations against him, and an internal investigation that revealed a pattern of misconduct--Zaimont then fired all of his remaining staff.
Hidden Variable and Autumn Games, who developed and published Skullgirls Mobile, then cut ties with Lab Zero, but stated that the game is "bigger than any individual", announcing that it would be taking over to "build new Skullgirls content". That leads us to the update, which removed much of the problematic content, helping to represent the ideals of the devs.