3D Realms and Voidpoint have issued a joint statement, declaring they will roll back recent censorship of Ion Fury.

In case you missed it, Voidpoint developers apologized after individuals from Reset Era drew attention to content in the game that they deemed homophobic (including one instance that could only be accessed via a noclip cheat to see content outside the level), along with messages posted by the developers on their Discord that they deemed transphobic.

Afterwards, Voidpoint announced they would be donating $10,000 from Ion Fury’s release day proceeds to an LGBT charity, undertook staff sensitivity training, and “patching Ion Fury ASAP to remove all unacceptable language.”

Gamers then began to rally against Voidpoint, feeling that cow-towing to outcry would only enable future tactics against other developers. Voidpoint attempted to calm their audience, though stress clearly began to mount- at one point declaring “If you want to pirate it, it’s only like 95MB. You should check it out. We worked really hard on it and it’s a cool game. Fuck politics.”

Now, 3D Realms and Voidpoint have issued a statement via the game’s newsfeed on Steam.

“We’ve caused a recent controversy suggesting Ion Fury game content was to be censored.

We will absolutely NOT be censoring Ion Fury or any of our other games, now or in the future, including but not limited to by removing gags such as gaming’s most controversial facial wash.

We do not support censorship of creative works of any kind and regret our initial decision to alter a sprite in the game instead of trusting our instincts. 3D Realms and Voidpoint stand together on this matter.

Last but not least, please respect our need to keep our community forums clean from hateful messages, spam, or off-topic threads. We recognize our mistake and have received your message loud and clear!”

What do you think? Sound off in the comments below!

Ion Fury is out now on Windows PC and Linux, and will launch 2019 for PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One.