Microsoft have taken a sudden interest in the current Steam exclusive sandbox game, Rust. This interest started shortly after the Xbox community practically began begging the Facepunch Studio to bring the game over to the Xbox One. Microsoft have taken action and have provided the developer with Xbox One developer kits and are welcoming the game to their ID@XBOX platform with open arms — however, they have a few demands before the game will be accepted and this concerns censorship.

Rust is quickly becoming one of the more popular sandbox games available right now; despite being in early alpha stages people are loving it. The game does, though, contain some full frontal nudity (in the form of male genitalia) and this has caused a lot of YouTube videos to be flagged for inappropriate content. Microsoft’s indie game policy is also very strict on what sort of content may be submitted through the indie portal.

The strange thing is that previously Garry Newman of Facepunch Studios praised Steam for its super-friendly indie-developer policy that allows them to publish whatever they want without censorship and allows them to push out as many updates as they want, when they want. This is the exact opposite of Microsoft ID@XBOX policy which, I might add, is under a lot of scrutiny at the moment.

In order for Rust to pass inspection the developers must censor or remove the full frontal nudity from the Xbox One version unless Facepunch Studio and Microsoft come to some sort of agreement. The fortunate thing is this will not effect game-play in the slightest way and could potential attract a larger audience if the developer decides to remove the unnecessary nudity from the PC version.