The Maintenance - Censorship

Snowbreak went into Maintenance mode on the 2nd of March (or the 3rd, depending on your time zone).
Snowbreak re-opened at 6:00AM UTC on the 8th of May.

This means the game was down for the other 29 days of March, all 30 days of April, and 7 days of May, for 66 days total (again, possibly +-1 depending on your time zone).

This article is about the censorship imposed on the game. If you want to read my thoughts on the compensation we got for the Maintenance, then read this article instead.

So... what happened?

I have no idea.
I've heard a lot of speculation, but nothing has been officially stated.

I've seen a lot of people say that it was Love and DeepSpace ("LaDS") players complaining to the Chinese government about Snowbreak (both LaDS and Snowbreak are made and run by Chinese companies, as are most gacha games).
One gacha game going after another is pretty common in China, as Chinese laws are enforced somewhat arbitrarily, and are rather poorly defined to begin with, and a Chinese company that wants another Chinese company to fail can usually cause a lot of damage, with how much damage they do largely determined by how influential/corrupt their contacts are and how large the bribes they can offer are, and gacha games trying to destroy each other is pretty common in China.
LaDS players going after Snowbreak via extremely shady methods (i.e. governemntal corruption and bribery) seems to be the most common explanation I have seen by a hige margin, and again - gacha companies snipping at each other is decently common in China, so it's entirely plausible, although it could have been anybody complaining - who did it may be something the general public/playerbase simply never knows.

A lot of the other explanations I have seen suggested wouldn't require the game to be so heavily censored upon re-release, which does somewhat discredit them.

It's all just speculation though - I have no idea, and nobody else seems to have any actual evidence to support their ideas.
Something did definitely happen though - Seasun wouldn't just take their game down for over 2 months to fully censor it without an extremely strong reason, and I can't think of anything else compelling enough wother than an actual requirement to do so from the government.

The Changes

Question: So, what changed?
Answer: Quite a lot, actually.

Not much has changed in terms of the games actual combat and game mechanics - that's largely unchanged, at least as far as I can tell.
...at least aside from the bugs, that is.
This patch does seem somewhat rushed, and there do seem to be quite a few bugs.
Snowbreak has generally had very few bugs, and the devs do always fix them extremely quickly after being told about them, so hopefully they'll all be fixed soon, but there does seem to be a lot more bugs than usual this patch.
Heck, even the Survey itself to ask players their opinions on this update is itself broken.

It might also just be me, but the game seems to run very slightly worse now - I think my graphical settings are the same as they were (although I of course don't remember exactly what they were, so it's possible they have been reset or changed in some way), but the games performance does seem a bit worse. It's not unplayable by any means, but it is noticeable.
If you're a new player (or your PC is a bit less archaic than mine...) you might not notice any problems at all, but as an experienced player with a pretty old PC, the difference is small, but noticeable.
I feel I have seen a few areas where the game does run slightly better, so this could be unrelated to the censorship changes and could just be a change to the games code that they just happened to push out this patch, but that would sure be one hell of a coincidence. Possible though.

The Censorship Changes

The game is now heavily censored - all the girls are now very censored, having had their models altered with things to cover their breasts and crotch/hips/waist/inner thighs (should they not have been heavily covered already).
While there are one or two skins that weren't that revealing, and thus didn't need to be changed [much], almost all outfits have been changed, and basically every outfit that has been changed looks worse, and most outfits look dramatically worse now than they did before, although a few still look decent.
The paid outfits were generally more revealing, and have generally thus been censored more, but many of the default outfits have been changed too, often very significantly.

In addition:

The game has removed the ability to freely rotate the camera in menus, effectively removing a lot of the use of the games jiggle physics.
The games jiggle physics seems to have been toned down to a huge degree. It's still there, but much weaker than what it was.
All Interactive Scenes have also been almost completely removed - you still get the basic pose for the home screen, but the interactions have been removed, as have all the other non-default poses.
Victory Animations have also been removed.
Home Screen interactions have also been removed.
The idle animations the girls used to have in the menus have also been removed.
The trailers for new operatives and weapons in their gacha banners have also been removed.
The Photo Booth mode has also been removed, so you can't take photos with the girls any more.
You could freely move and rotate the camera in this mode, which was undoubtedly the reason for its removal.
The Archive has also been removed.
This used to be between "Squad" and "Storage" on the home screen. It's painfully obvious that something used to be there, and has been removed.
Even if you didn't care about the sexualization in Snowbreak or the girls at all, removing the Archive removes the ability to listen to the games music, view story-related CGs, and view the profiles of the games bosses, including things like their Elemental Resistances, so even if you didn't care about the girls at all this would still be a very bad change and does actually affect gameplay, albeit to a minor degree.
The ability to change the music in the Base has also been removed - the object you used to interact with is still there, you just can't interact with it now.
You used to be able to use this to listen to music for older content that has since been removed, or seasonal content. That music is no longer something you can listen to at all.
When doing an Echo/pull, you are no longer shown the items you've received - it just goes straight to the overview, even if you get a 5* - There are no individual animations at all.
Animations in the Operative menu's have been removed, and the girls no longer have a unique pose for the "Logistics" and "Manifestation" screen, and now use their default standing pose instead.

Basically anything that has even the slightest hint of sexualization has been either removed or extremely heavily censored, and if a group of 3D animations had one that was slightly suggestive, then they've all been removed, even if some or even most of them were fine.

These are also just the changes I have noticed so far in my few hours with the game post-Maintenance - there's undoubtedly some other stuff I haven't found yet, but I am not going to bother making an exhaustive list. Suffice to say it's a lot.

Note that Snowbreak has heavily censored some of the outfits that are purchased with IRL money.
The Interactive Scenes were also purchased with IRL money, and they have been removed entirely.
This is bad, but the lack of any comments made by the devs about this means they are probably aware of it and trying to find a solution - if they weren't trying to find a solution then I feel that they would have offered a refund, rebate, or some other solution, just like the last time Snowbreak introduced censorship.
If you want a refund because something you paid money for is now much worse than what was advertised, or has been removed entirely, then that's perfectly fair.

The Fallout

Most gacha games are designed for mobile first, and PC second (if at all), and thus tend to have a lot of minigames and side content that you can dip in and out of without a huge time investment - stuff for you to play on your phone when you have a free moment. Gacha games are often designed to be second-games - something you play a bit here and there, not something to spend a large chunk of time on.
Most gacha games also have little in the way of repeatable endgame content - i.e. content that would pose a challenge to an experienced and skilled player with strong, maxed-level characters.
This is true of Snowbreak as well - it's mostly minigames and side content, and the only endgame content is generally Neural Simulation and Supreme Battleground, which have always been limited in their replayability. They reset each week, but you probably weren't getting more than an hour or two of gameplay out of them before you got bored or replaying the same two bosses and stopped, and players have been asking for more endgame content for a long while now.

Whilst I always felt that combat in Snowbreak was fun, there wasn't that much of it that offered a challenge to high-level players, and a lot of what made Snowbreak great was the girls - the large amount of characterization each girl had, as well as the expressiveness of their 3D model and animations.
Whenever Snowbreak introduces a new girl, she always get the spotlight - a new story chapter dedicated to her, but also the usual other sources of interaction, like the Random Events in the base, the story from her Personal File, her Home Screen interactions and dialogue. Even just the idle animations - both in combat and in the menus and Home Screen.
To me, the removal of many of the girls animations and associated voice lines does remove a lot of their characterization, their individuality, and their personality, which was what carried the game for me, but also for a lot of players, I think.
For a lot of players, Snowbreak was carried by its sexuality, but I think even the most hardcore gooner would still have to admit that the girls having their own personality and flair, and every girl being so distinct, both in terms of looks and personality, did add a lot to the game, and was one of its core features.

Can Snowbreak survive with this level of censorship?

That depends on how you interpret the question, but very probably no.

Certainly, a lot of players played at least in part due to the pretty girls, and a lot of those players will either stop paying for things (i.e. outfits) in the game or will just stop playing the game altogether.
The amount of support Snowbreak will receive from its players is going to drop.
It's going to drop by a lot.

It's not just the removal of a huge chunk of the games sexualization, it's also that the devs gave no communication at all during the Maintenance - I am sure they didn't communicate because they couldn't, but even now the changes aren't acknowledged anywhere.
Many players were excited to see the game was re-launching, but had their hopes dashed to find half the game missing.

Whilst the number of things your girls can shoot with their guns remains the same, a lot of what made Snowbreak wasn't the combat, and instead was the little things - the idle animations, the home screen interactions, the archive where you could recap the story CGs to relive your interactions with the girls. Little things like that.
Little things add up, and for Snowbreak they added up to give the girls, and thus the game, a good vibe - it was fun. The girls made it fun, but the girls and the story writing did also make the game hopeful - challenges could be overcome, the world could be saved, and everything could be made better, all through the actions of the characters.
Now though, a lot of the little things in the game have been removed, and that does somewhat kill the soul of the game, at least to me.

Even if you genuinely didn't care about the sexualization in Snowbreak, the loss of so many little animations, voice lines, and other little details means that there is now much less game than there was, and having less game means players are going to be less willing to spend to support it.

A lot of players won't want to support the game because there are no longer any nice outfits they want to buy, but there's also the problem that many players won't want to support the game, just because they have no confidence on how the game will change over time - why buy a skin when it could be made worse at literally any time?
Snowbreak has never had forced censorship like this before, and since that does kill a bit part of the games identity, the games future is uncertain.

I am sure that some people will still support the game - either because they like the new outfits, they like the new character[s], they are optimistic for the future, or even just the sunk-cast fallacy. Whatever the case, at least some people will still support the game.
Will those people be enough to maintain the game in its current state? For the devs to continue with the same level of quality, with the same pace of updates, with the same speed of bug fixes?
I don't know, although personally I seriously doubt it.
Then again, the game has much fewer animations and voice lines, so they have much less work to do than they did before, I guess, so I suppose it's possible...

Personally, I don't think Snowbreak will survive like this.
Not in the long-run, at least.
The devs probably have enough money to survive for a while, even if they don't make any money this patch, but that will dry up eventually.
Many players will probably give the game a patch or two to see if any of the changes are reverted, but if they aren't then I don't think enough support will be there for the game for it to survive long-term, at least not with the same level of content or quality, but possibly at all.

It is inevitable that there will be mods that removed the censorship and re-add the cut content, and I've already seen people using mods to do this a mere couple of hours after the game came back online, but according to the ToS using mods can get your account banned, and I've several people who have claimed to have been banned for using such a mod, although they could have been banned for other unrelated reasons, or it could be an old screenshot of an unrelated bad. Either way being banned is definitely a possibility.
It's also an unofficial solution, and hence can break at any time anyway.
Even if there is a way to de-censor the game, I very strongly recommend that you don't do it, at least for the time being. It's not worth it.
You've waited 2 months, you can wait a bit more to see if there's an official solution, or just the game being actually de-censored somewhere down the line.

At the very least, if I can say one thing with 100% absolute certainty, it's that the devs know that this is bad, and they are looking for any way they can to undo the censorship.

I know a lot of people were expecting the game to re-open with two different sets of servers - one for CN and one for global, so the global audience could still play the game without the censorship. After all, if they did that it's not like it would actually change what gets shown to the CN audience - it would only affect the people outside of China.
I've heard some people say that it might be taken poorly by the CN audience, which is their main demographic, but that's just how it is - if a ship is going down and you can safely save some people without affecting the rest, then you should. The CN audience might be angry that "Ours is censored and theirs is uncensored", but for most people it's the first half that is the entirely of the problem, and a lot of people just won't care about the second half.
I can see that there are some reasons against it, but I personally think that having two sets of servers would be a good thing for the game - at least if this censorship isn't just a short-term thing.
This alone makes me wonder whether Seasun could survive off of non-CN revenue alone? Had they released a global server and the global playerbase didn't see any of this censorship and didn't lose any trust in the game or the industry, would that have been enough to keep the game running?
It's an interesting thought experiment, although nothing more than that as I don't think we'll ever get the numbers to know for sure.

It's also worth noting that Snowbreak has had a pretty terrible Content Creator programme, critiqued by Vicush on the now discontinued Snowbreak.gg, but other than Snowbreak.gg and this site, Snowbreak doesn't really have much in the way of non-video content, and YouTube and Twitch are both famous for their poorly defined rules and arbitrary enforcement, so Snowbreak-related content isn't even safe on those platforms.
Like a lot of gacha games, there aren't actually that many content creators for it, so it would only take a few content creators to leave to have a huge negative impact on the community, in particular for new players.
Web domains are typically licenced for one year at a time, and this sites domain has another like 6 months or so left before I have to decide whether I want to spend the like $10 to renew it or not, so I'll keep this site updated for the next few months, at the very least.
Whether I continue to make Snowbreak content after that depends both on whether the game can de-censor itself to an acceptable degree, but also whether there's any community left to read my content when/if they do de-censor it.

The Wider Fallout

What has happened is sad, and I am sure the Snowbreak devs hated censoring their game just as much as we hate the censorship.

The real question is what is the wider effect of this going to be?

Snowbreak was pretty unique as far as gacha games were concerned - if you wanted a waifu FPS your options are extremely limited - personally I play all the gacha games I want to already, so if Snowbreak goes down I won't replace it with anything - I'll probably just play more single-player games or get some more actual work done instead, and given how few other games there are that are similar to Snowbreak, I imagine that a lot of the Snowbreak playerbase also won't jump ship to another game, and will instead play non-gacha games or do non-gaming things with their time instead.
Regardless of how unique the game is/was, it's still both a Chinese game, as well as a gacha game.
A Chinese gacha game complaining to and bribing the Chinese government into bullying another Chinese gacha game is a surprisingly regular occurrence, although a game as large as Snowbreak having to goo offline and make such large changes is insane, and I feel it's unprecedented.
(Although I don't keep up with the gacha space that much, so maybe something this large has happened before. It's certainly extremely unusual though, even in the gach space.)

Regardless, this is going to have knock-on effects.
For starters, I've seen a huge amount of people saying that Love and DeepSpace ("LaDS") was the cause for Snowbreaks censorship, and I have no doubt that that game will undoubtedly receive significant fallout as a result. How visible this fallout is to the playerbase and general public could be large or small, but there will be fallout there, and the devs will definitely face a lot of problems as a result of it, and the game could see massive changes as a result, although many of these might only be visible to the devs, or their consequences might result in the game changing in unexpected ways, or ways that aren't immediately obvious to the playerbase.

Beyond that, this may cause issues in the gacha space more widely.
After all, Snowbreak is a gooner game, but it's not the worst gooner game out there.
There are other gooner games out there, for example Brown Dust II, Azur Lane, or Nikke, and again, there are other gacha games that are much more down-bad than Snowbreak by a huge margin.
Snowbreak is also a pretty large game - it had a pretty big playerbase and made a good income for itself, and it still wasn't safe from the Chinese governments forced censorship.
There are a lot of gacha games, and Chinese games in general, that will look at Snowbreak, and realize that their game is smaller and/or much more explicit than Snowbreak, and they will feel compelled to reign in their sexualization, and even games much larger than Snowbreak may look at what has happened and change their direction as a result, or at the very least take more precautions.

Gacha games plan their updates well in advance, so you may not see immediate changes, but I suggest you think back on this 6 months from now and compare the art direction and monetization of the games you play to see how much they have changed. It may not be every game, but I imagine a lot of games will try to be more cautious from now on, even if only a little.

Similarly, Snowbreak had the money to be able to go offline for over 2 months, and still be able to deliver the new update at the end of it.
For a lot of other games, going offline for 2-3 months would be an immediate death sentence, so other games may start to plan their finances around potentially needing to take a period of forced downtime, which could affect how they monetize, plan, or deliver their content.

This can also cause changes to how gacha games tend to monetize themselves.
It is well known that Western players spend most of their money on gacha games on outfits, and Eastern players spend most of their money on gacha games on pulls, but the constant threat of extreme censorship may change how the games monetize themselves, as well as how their outfits are treated and made.
After all, if you could be forced to censor all of your games outfits at any time, then you might just make them less risque/suggestive to begin with, or you might introduce optional parts or variants so that the more sexualized variants can be easily removed without removing the outfits entirely, and only a few optional pieces need to be removed or disabled.

Snowbreak having to go offline for such a long period of time is very bad.
Snowbreak having to censor itself so much is very bad.
This is bad not only for Snowbreak though, but for the entire industry, and for every Chinese gacha game in particular.
The confidence we had in Snowbreak has been shattered, but every player who understands what has happened will probably now be much more cautious around every gacha game, and every Chinese gacha game in particular.

Nothing good has come from this.
Snowbreak is worse now as a direct result of these changes.
Some other games will probably face some negative effects as a result of this, even if it's just a tiny loss of confidence, tarnishing their game and the general publics perception of similar games.
Every Chinese gacha game will now forever be in the spotlight, with every change they make and all new content able to be used as a justification for "Maintenance", which a lot of them won't be able to survive.

If Snowbreak can revert some of the changes and survive, then that's good.
If Snowbreak dies, then its grave will be a constant reminder to the rest of the industry of what happens if somebody else has a grudge against you and the contacts to bribe and blackmail the Chinese government against you, or if somebody thinks you have stepped out of line, irrespective of whether you have actually done anything wrong at all.

All live-service games will eventually end and go offline - this is an inevitability, and any money you spend on them is always a gamble, but when you gamble you usually have a pretty good idea of the odds.
In the constant forced-march towards End-of-Service, Snowbreak is now lying in pool of their own blood by the side of the road as the other gacha games walk by, utterly helpless, unable to do anything but watch, no doubt scared they too will be taken down for reasons they do not understand and have no way of avoiding.
I do hope Snowbreak can get up, dig the bullets out of itself, make a full recovery, and continue onwards, and hopefully make a full comeback and give us our girls back, but Snowbreak is only one of the casualties - the other casualty is the trust that players have in Chinese gacha games, and live-service games in general, and that's something that gets worse every time something like this happens, and it doesn't ever get better. We aren't at the breaking point yet where something big will fundamentally change the industry, but I feel that this is a massive leap towards that point.

Again, to close this out, I will reiterate:
Literally nobody benefitted from this.
It's very bad for Snowbreak.
It erodes the trust players have in all Chinese games.
It erodes the trust players have in all live-service games.
It erodes the trust players have in all gacha games.

Nobody benefitted from this, and both the players and developers of both Snowbreak as well as the players and developers of every other game are worse off because of this.