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Indie bestseller Tiny Bookshop disappeared off of the Nintendo Switch eShop after it was found to have shipped with the word "arsehole," without any warning to the developers.
Tiny Bookshop – a cutesy game in which you run a tiny bookshop – was released onto Nintendo Switch back in August, and despite indie powerhouses like Hades 2 and Hollow Knight: Silksong releasing in the weeks that followed, it managed to keep a strong standing in the charts of the Nintendo Switch eShop. This lasted until one day it suddenly disappeared from the charts, and in fact, the shop itself.
Speaking to Aftermath, Neoludic co-CEO and creative director David Zapfe-Wildemann recalls that the team only noticed "when people started reaching out via DM asking what was going on."
Digital game developers submit games through the International Age Rating Coalition (IARC), which in turn gives ratings to each of the different ratings boards around the world. This is done via a survey, where devs will explain the content of their game – something that Zapfe-Wildemann says had "a lack of clear guidelines" – and resulted in an E rating.
However, when applying for physical game release ratings, the individual ratings boards do a more thorough check, so when the ESRB found the "arsehole," the game was deemed a T for Teen, which Zapfe-Wildemann explains then triggered a "mandatory update to the digital store" and the delisting of Tiny Bookshop.
Skystone Games publishing head Dmitry Muratov notes, "A single word in more than 100,000 words of localization was caught and scrutinized without a chance for us to fix it pre-release," adding, "It’s frustrating when you see massive AAA games with much more mature themes, while a cozy bookshop game gets pulled over a single instance of text."
Zapfe-Wildemann adds that replacing the word "would have been five minutes of work," but Nintendo did not inform the team until after it was already down.
And while the removal itself is frustrating, it adds an extra layer of issues due to how much of a mess the Nintendo eShop is. Zapfe-Wildemann says, "The impact was immediate and severe," because "On Switch, the bestseller list is one of the most critical discoverability tools the platform has." He continues, "It is incredibly difficult to re-enter those charts once that momentum is broken."
However, the game has managed to get back into the top 30, something that "couldn't have happened without an amazing worldwide community rallying behind us."
