Sharing pics of Watch Dogs 2’s genitals could get you kicked off PSN

Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs 2 offers a “fresh approach to world and objective design,” according to Polygon’s review of the open-world game. It also features fully modeled and textured male and female genitalia, one player who got the game early discovered this week. Unfortunately, that same player also found out that sharing screenshots of the game’s full-frontal nudity can get your PlayStation account suspended.

Adam, who hails from the U.K. and managed to get an early copy of Watch Dogs 2 from Amazon, said he had his Sony Entertainment Network account suspended after using the PlayStation 4’s Share feature to tweet a picture of a background character’s vagina.

“On Sunday evening I accidentally blew up a few women in a back alley with a gas pipe and then I saw *it*;” Adam wrote in a post on NeoGAF, “someone at Ubisoft had rendered a full vagina on one (or maybe more) of the females in the game.

“I took a picture of this funny oversight with the ingame camera and shared it on twitter for my friends to see and I posted it in one of the Watch Dogs early release threads on here. Cut to tonight where I can't access any services while playing the game and then when I tried to sign in there was a very brief message about my account being suspended.”

In an email to Polygon, Adam said he originally found the surprise nudity “kind of humorous at the time because I work in QA and assumed one of my own had let this slip,” but “it turns out there’s a lot of nudity in [Watch Dogs 2].”

Adam’s screenshot, which can be viewed on Twitter (and is extremely NSFW), makes it clear that Ubisoft put in the effort to, from toe to tip, accurately texture the game’s NPCs.

But just because it’s in the game doesn’t mean it won’t violate Sony’s terms of service, and sharing that image apparently led to Adam’s SEN account being temporarily banned. He received the following email from Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe’s moderation team:

We’re writing to inform you that your Sony Entertainment Network account has been temporarily suspended.

We’ve made this decision based on your online activity in Live from PlayStation on 14-11-2016.

Content of an adult or sexual nature is against our Code of Conduct.

The suspension will last 1 week and will be lifted on 21-11-2016. You won’t be able to access online multiplayer, PlayStation Store and other network features until the suspension is over.

We take the decision to suspend an account very seriously, and we only do so after one of our moderators has carefully analysed the situation. PlayStation Support therefore cannot overturn this moderation decision.

We ask all our players to act decently, respectfully and with consideration for us and other players while using PlayStation Network. To make sure you understand the behaviour we expect from our community, please review the Code of Conduct here before returning to PlayStation Network. Please be aware that any further breaches of the Code of Conduct may result in a longer suspension or even a permanent ban.

Sony’s code of conduct and the PlayStation Network’s terms of service restrict users from posting “sexually offensive” content. From PlayStation’s Community Code of Conduct “dos and don’ts” section:

Make sure your Online ID, messages, forum posts, user generated content or any other form of communication are not offensive to others: do not post anything that is defamatory (making an untrue statement that may be damaging to the person concerned) or racially, ethnically, religiously or sexually offensive.

Full-frontal nudity in Watch Dogs 2 isn’t some kind of mistake or something that got past ratings boards like the ESRB. In fact, one section of the game lets you hang out with and hack some hula-hooping nudists:

Watch Dogs 2’s rating on the ESRB specifically calls out the game’s nudity:

The game contains some sexual material: a man selling child pornography over the phone (no sexual acts or nudity depicted); a strip club depicting pole dancers and topless women; brief instances of male and female full-frontal nudity (e.g., a woman in body paint; a man standing with a woman outdoors).

Other users have been sharing their nudity-laden Watch Dogs 2 selfies and run-ins with naked NPCs to Twitter and YouTube, thought it’s not clear if Sony will be going after everyone for reveling in nakedness. We’ve reached out to Sony to ask about its code of conduct as it relates to sharing in-game content.