Play-Asia mocks "SJW nonsense" on twitter, gains fans & sells DOAX3 by the barrel

When Koei Tecmo the creators of the game Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, a volleyball game where the women fighter characters are on an island wearing skimpy bikinis, stated on their FB page that "We do not bring DOAX3 to the west", they seemed to have inadvertently made a great PR coup for their game. FB-fans kept probing, and to the followup question "Why not?" the company replied cryptically "Do you know many issues happening in video game industry with regard to how to treat female in video game industry? We do not want to talk those things here. But certainly have gone through in last year or two to come to our decision. Thank you."

Now, you can interpret that as possibly a reference to gamergate, possibly just their own experience with how western media reviews this particular games series and its boob physics - Koei Tecmo has made no further statements to clarify. But another company did: meet Play-Asia, who on twitter announced that you could get the Japanese game via them, stating the reason it won't be coming to the USA is "due to #SJW nonsense". And presto, the outrage brigade promised to boycott Play Asia, kickstarting what is known as the Streisand effect.

Unlike the Protein World Beach Body Billboard protests, there was no billboard offline that attracted attention, instead Play-Asia has jumped straight to the twitter tactic employed by Protein World post-protest. The catalyst here was their own first tweet. It was accused of using 'White Supremacist dogwhistles' terms pretty much immediately, and some people seemed to be trying to start a boycott of the company. However, as Play-Asia's twitter account grew from 9000 followers to twenty thousand followers overnight, that boycott seems to have failed. A developer in the US offered $1M dollars for the publishing rights in the USA, adding "I'm serious" to their tweet, though it's hard for some to take Twitter business offers seriously. They were soon joined by a $2M offer for European rights from Instacodez. Who knew there was this much money in bikini games?

The facebook-twitter kerfluffle has been written up in The Mary Sue, Kotaku, Breitbart, countless blogs and is still generating tons of tweets - some quite funny, some saltier than others, and now this seems to be a cheap social media marketing tactic - just as predicted when Protein World did it. Previously unknown and brand new (domain was registered in May) Uber-clone Dryvyng joined in with this tweet (below). Much like when FortCloud used a lingerie clad woman they bought themselves instant retweets with this gag. Whether it will attract actual investors remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, @Pixelmetal a.k.a Nick Robalik, creator of Sombrero tweeted this "concept art" from the game. Salt mining is now a sport on twitter, but is it an effective strategy for anything but bikini & beach volleyball style games?


We've previously interviewed Nick Robalik about saverpoint and on "rebranding" gamergate. We also kept tabs on the Protein World billboard, it was humorsly spoofed by Carlsberg and Last Minute.com, not banned by the ASA, hijacked by a creative team to advertise the women's world cup, and the billboard even caused bomb threats to be sent to Protein World's offices. Lets hope these cheeky shenanigans don't get that out of hand.
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Squirly's picture

"Who knew there was this much money in bikini games?"

Most of us. The hand-wringing "progressives" want that fact to be buried more than anything, which is why they constantly try and give the impression that there is "outrage" over something like CGI breasts.

CJ's picture

This is beautiful, and proof that GamerGate has ALWAYS been about fighting authoritarian bullies and not some mythical conspiracy to keep women out of gaming.

We'll keep fighting. And we'll keep winning.

Jaycee K.'s picture

It would be a more credible "victory" if the PR rep had straight up said they were doing it because of gamergate. I for one remain skeptical.