Dispatch was one of the most highly-anticipated Switch games of the year — but fans of the franchise were left feeling short-changed after the game was unavoidably censored.
The choice-driven narrative game was first released with much acclaim in late 2025. It follows Robert Robertson, a former superhero, who works as an operator for the Superhero Dispatch Network. Among other things, the smash hit game is known for its use of profanity, crude humor, and even full-frontal nudity, along with sex scenes.
For those playing on PS5 or PC, the game provides you with the option of censoring nudity, along with the ability to switch to royalty-free music in order to aid streaming the game online.
However, for players on the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, this censorship was not optional.
There are black boxes covering areas in all nudity scenes, the bleeping out of curse words, while sound effects for an intimate scene are entirely removed. A middle finger is also covered by a black box.
Players complain online
Disgruntled players took to X to complain about the changes. One user quoted a post by AdHoc Studio, writing: "Let’s forcibly censor our game and wait until it’s too late for everybody that pre-ordered it to cancel before we say anything."
"Your fault for playing the game on a children’s console, I guess," quipped @puppycelebrity back. "I'm sorry, but if you're pre-ordering in 2026, you had it coming," agreed @Ambrosia_Please.
"In the same way two things can be true, censorship is bad and preordering a game should get you institutionalized," wrote @funk_a_lunk.
Another quoted an account reporting the news and added: "This makes no sense? Nintendo has hundreds of Switch and Switch 2 games that contain nudity, swearing, and gore. Cyberpunk, Bayonetta, Mortal Kombat, GTA 1- 3, The Walking Dead, all those Japanese 'fan service' games on the eShop. What makes Dispatch any different?"
The same user also shared a screenshot, which seemed to imply that AdSense was the one responsible for the censoring.
Luckily, some gamers say they were able to get their money back.
"I was able to secure a refund from Nintendo today," wrote @Fu11MetalAsian on X. "[I] let them know it was misleading to the consumer that this information about forced censorship wasn’t available to us and they didn’t even fight back on it."
"I got my preorder canceled from speaking to someone from customer support and told them the reason was the game being censored without any announcement of it," wrote @AKAslayer101. "I already got my refund put back into my account."
Both AdHoc and Nintendo respond
In a statement, AdHoc made it clear that Nintendo expected the censoring and claimed that they worked on a disclaimer to be visible on the storefront to make these changes clear to players.
"Where we absolutely need to take full ownership is the placement of that disclaimer," AdHoc added. "Again, it was our intent to go out of our way to tell people looking to buy the game that the content was censored. While we didn't have complete control of the language, we did have control of the placement. Wires got crossed and we put the disclaimer in the field literally titled 'Disclaimer', instead of the 'About The Game' section. We didn't catch this until after the launch when we saw people saying we should have called out the changes on the store page, and we went to go make sure it was there. It technically has been the entire time, just in the absolute worst spot that makes it look like we were trying to hide it."
Adhoc continued: "This is 100% our mistake, and it was fixed in the Americas store pages a few hours after launch to give more visibility. We've also added a disclaimer before purchase. As of writing this, the other regions have either published this change or are in the process of review."
Meanwhile, in a statement to IGN, Nintendo said: "Nintendo requires all games on its platforms to receive ratings from independent organizations and to meet our established content and platform guidelines. While we inform partners when their titles don’t meet our guidelines, Nintendo does not make changes to partner content. We also do not discuss specific content or the criteria used in making these determinations."
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