Last year word got around that Nintendo's Japan-only quirky game Tomodachi Collection had a glitch in it that allowed male characters to engage in a same-sex relationship, including having children. This brought a lot of applause from equality-minded gamers until Nintendo released a patch that, instead of making the glitch a feature and including lesbian couples, removed the option altogether.
Nintendo has now announced that they'll be bringing the game's sequel Tomodachi Life stateside for Westerners to enjoy…but still with no gay relationship option. This would be less of a sticking point if it weren't for the fact that the Tomodachi series is, like The Sims, a life simulator that is meant to reflect the life and imagination of the player rather than adhering to the motives of existing characters within an established narrative.
Incidentally, the reason The Sims originally allowed same-sex couples is because it was actually more work to code the characters as gendered and set up rules that would check for and allow or disallow marriages based on gender pairings. Since Tomodachi Life is set up with those rules in its coding, someone on board is consciously and explicitly making the decision to remove same-sex couples from the game.
