Dispatch's censorship on Switch causes big player uproar

AdHoc says the core game experience has been preserved on Nintendo platforms despite it blacking out explicit scenes

Dispatch's release on Nintendo platforms today was poised to be another testament to AdHoc's tremendous success with the point-and-click superhero workplace comedy, but news of a platform-specific difference has overshadowed much of the excitement for fans hoping to play the episodic series on-the-go. Instead of celebrating the release, fans are launching campaigns against Dispatch's censorship, returning their purchases, or refraining from playing it altogether.

Normally, Dispatch contains nudity and sexually explicit scenes involving its gang of ex-villains. AdHoc allows players to toggle sexual content like this off on most platforms. Curiously, however, the newly-released Switch version automatically depicts censored versions of these scenes. There's no option to turn the setting off.

AdHoc confirmed the censorship to Eurogamer, but noted that the overall experience would still be the same for Switch players.

"Different platforms have different content criteria, and submissions are evaluated individually ... we worked with Nintendo to ensure the content within the title met the criteria to release on their platforms, but the core narrative and gameplay experience remains identical to the original release," AdHoc says.

It might be true that the overall gist of the game hasn't changed on Switch, but fans aren't having it all the same. There's a lot of confusion over why Dispatch was apparently pushed to censor its game, yet big-budget games are allowed to depict sexual content without similar constraints. The Switch has also been plagued by hentai shovelware or AI slop games hinged on their sexual content. AdHoc declined to comment beyond the statement it had already given Eurogamer.

"Really annoyed that they chose not to mention this until release day," one Dispatch fan writes. "I pre-ordered and now it's too late to cancel and get it on a different platform."

Where some fans are unhappily stuck with a version of the game they don't want, others say they're having success returning the game to Nintendo's storefront. While AdHoc did not share any numbers regarding the frequency of Switch returns, social media posts describing fans' experiences getting refunds and urging others to do the same are proliferating all over the internet. Unhappy fans are also voicing their displeasure to AdHoc directly. Some people reportedly didn't know about the censorship until they were already playing the game — and being confronted with large black bars unexpectedly ruined the experience.

"I stopped playing right at [an explicit scene] which is maybe like 10-20 minutes into the game," one fan says.

Since AdHoc is not expanding on the circumstances leading to Dispatch's censorship, the public is left to speculate. One popular theory posits that the decision may reflect the way different regions such as Japan have rating boards with specific criteria involving things like nudity. While many people point to games like Cyberpunk 2077 as an example of a double standard when it comes to sexual content on Nintendo platforms, VGC points out that CD Projekt's situation is not so cut-and-dried. Instead, the RPG makers released two different versions of Cyberpunk 2077 on the Japanese market, one of which is censored and without any nudity.

Dispatch has sold three million copies as of early January 2026, but AdHoc is also an independent developer — and juggling multiple versions of the game, each with its own costs and certification processes, might not be nearly as feasible. AdHoc has not confirmed this theory.

At least one positive thing has come from all the anger, however: the game's Nintendo Switch store description now informs potential customers of its censorship. Hopefully, this means fewer people on Nintendo platforms will feel bamboozled by AdHoc — assuming they read the description at all.