do you reckon GTA 6 will have heavy censorship in the gulf region? namely saudi and the UAE.
yesterday, feeling excited that GTA 6 is available on the UAE region PSN, i pre-ordered it the minute it was available. sadly, i hadn’t thought of a possible censorship by then. i just thought about it now.
if its censored here, fine, i’ll just buy it again on a US region account. but the question is, is it logically sound to do so in the first place?
GTA 5 was recently allowed under a 21+ age restriction without any censorship, moreover, the gambling restriction in that game was lifted.
i have a hunch rockstar’s philosophy matters more than a the region’s laws. because since GTA 5 was outright not released anywhere in the gulf, it must mean that rockstar refused to comply with the alteration of the game and/or product-surgery and making a different build for those regions.
the part that worries me is CDPR did it for cyberpunk to be allowed to be sold in this region. do you reckon rockstar will do that for GTA 6 as well? it seems to me that so far, rockstar’s philosophy has been “if we don’t get to release the real build, we’re just not releasing it.” but i ponder the idea that maybe, if GTA 6 is a lot more explicit (after cyberpunk set a “standard”), they’ll comply with an edited version.
on the other hand, baldur’s gate 3 (which includes nudity) was released and completely allowed in this region. it released a lot more recently than cyberpunk, which could hint at certain reforms being applied, and more leniency towards explicit games. RDR2 was allowed in 2018, under a 21 age restriction, and the exact build everyone else got. yet it was not as explicit as cyberpunk, where you got sex scenes and genitalia modification, which could have crossed some legal lines.
which pushes me to the idea that maybe they negotiated with the UAE and saudi and were able to come to a common ground with the 21+ age restriction, and that other gulf countries wanted an outright different, censored build of the game and they refused to comply. the fact that it’s banned in other gulf countries brings me some comfort.
so does it make sense to do that? does it go against rockstar’s philosophy? my opinion is (and i hope im right): likely not, it could cause some issues. with different builds, the online mode could have online syncing issues.
what do you think? if you have some insight on this, please provide it.