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.