Once the year 2077 is over, apparently people will no longer bang an eyelash on undressed dicks, breasts and butts. However, in 2020 this is still a big deal, especially on Twitch where on-screen nudity often results in temporary or indefinite suspensions. But the platform does make exceptions for major games, with Cyberpunk 2077 being the last to get a free pass to combine semi-free sex with extreme free violence. This has resulted in a wide variety of Twitch clips with hundreds of thousands of views that focus on sex and nudity.
Such as Vice reported last week, streamers will have no problems broadcasting sexual content Cyberpunk 2077, Although Twitch’s Rules argue that ‘games with nudity, pornography, sex or sexual violence as a core focus or feature are completely prohibited’, and in the past the platform has gone so far as to prohibit specific games that contain sex and / or nudity. This is a definite double standard: games with a big budget, such as Cyberpunk, The Witcher 3, and Grand Theft Auto V. can portray sexually explicit topics and themes, but if smaller indie games do – be it for pornographic purposes or if more deliberate explorations of sex, romance, queerness, etc.– streamers must do their best to avoid nudity or they risk losing their channels. Many do not shy away from the risk at all. Smaller games, in turn, loses the potentially tremendous amount of visibility Twitch offers.
And yet, despite this attempt to keep nudity off the platform, Twitch is currently running over it, largely because of Cyberpunk 2077. If you look at Cyberpunk 2077‘s clip foldernudity takes center stage in countless clips. I scrolled down for 30 consecutive seconds and it was naked future flesh as far as the eye could see.
There are five of these daring clips most viewed on Twitch in the past seven days. Twitch’s current top clip sees the unlikely superstar Félix “xQc” Lengyel express shock when he accidentally activates a sex scene featuring a male character. It has nearly 450,000 views. The second most popular clip belongs to Twitch partner Kyle who is offended by the image of a “small” penis in the game. It has nearly 350,000 views. A little bit below that is Twitch star turned Mixer star Twitch star (again) Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek customizing his character’s penis slider in the character creator. That clip has nearly 220,000 views. A few slots below that is Lengyel judging in-game images of penises. Viewed almost 200,000 times. Below that there is a clip of Twitch star Imane “Pokimane” Anys yelling and asking ‘am I getting banned’ after showing breasts in the character creator. That clip has been viewed almost 130,000 times. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, with many others floating just below the threshold of Twitch’s top 20.
Twitch told Vice that streamers are allowed to play Cyberpunk provided that they “ progress naturally through things like character customization and don’t spend significant time on sexual content or nudity, ” but that doesn’t seem to stop streamers and viewers from enjoying too much of sexual content and nudity make the show. That in itself is not necessarily a problem; streamers can mark their broadcasts as intended for adult audiences, and many do. The problem is, Twitch doesn’t want nudity on its platform – a retrograde policy that is caused many unnecessary headaches, mostly for female streamers– but this is just about the clearest example possible of how money and eyeballs magically make those lines disappear.
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So now we find ourselves in a dingy cyberpunk alley, just seconds away from an uncomfortable question: What was the point of all these lines in the first place? Twitch hasn’t been irretrievably ruined in recent days by the presence of a great deal of nudity, and even if the company still prefers to restrict sexual content in general for legal and advertising purposes (or whatever), it’s the current no-actually-a-no-tolerance policy, just cold shoulders interesting smaller games in favor of big ones, for example, put dildos everywhere because they can.
It’s time for Twitch to re-evaluate its policies, to at least allow more games with nudity on a selective basis. While not an entirely analogous example, Valve has done this with Steam – albeit extremely mixed results. The alternative is that you like a game every time Cyberpunk comes out and streamers get to frolic with their virtual genitals without cutting the cruel restrictions of clothingwill hyperfix everyone on that and overload the platform with clips of nudity. After all, it’s not just that nudity is outrageous on Twitch; it is also new. Allow more nudity, and you reduce the novelty.
But for now the double standard remains. The ball is in Twitch’s field, but when was it not?