Moo! India Fallout 3 canceled by Microsoft due to “cultural insensitivities”; Brahmin to blame?

Fallout 3 Xbox 360 (also on PlayStation 3, PC)wont’ be coming to India, guys. Sorry. Microsoft decided to cancel its release just mere days away from its scheduled launch due to “cultural insensitivities”. Gasp! Did they just pull a Sony on us?!? Oh no, they didn’t! … Actually, they did. Read all about it after the jump.

Looks like Sony isn’t the only gaming company that’s feeling a tad too careful with hurting cultural sensitivities via their games. Microsoft too is being reported as pulling out one of its banner titles due to cultural sensitivities.

The Xbox 360 version of Bethesda‘s Fallout 3 was originally slated for an October 28 release, with Microsoft being the assigned distributor for the game. However, it’s been announced by Microsoft India today that the game won’t be coming to the land of spice and everything nice any longer.

According to their official statement:

Microsoft constantly endeavors to bring the best games to Indian consumers in sync with their international release. However, in light of cultural sensitivities in India, we have made the business decision not to bring Fallout 3 into the country.

Now we’re not too sure what it is in the game that would make it “culturally insensitive” to Indian gamers – we doubt it’s the drug content, though. GTA IV is also distributed in the area and this apparently is not cause for a game’s pullout.

So we’ve been throwing around our ideas here at the humble QJ offices. Not that we’re nosy (okay, so we are, actually), but it really is quite curious to have a big anticipated game like Fallout 3 suddenly pulled out from a territory without specifics this close to the release date. And voila. We remembered that in the original Fallout game, there’s this creature called the Brahmin, a two-headed cow mutated by radiation.

If you are not that familiar with Indian culture, cows are considered sacred animals to them because they are believed to be vehicles of several deities. Kamadhenu, for example, is a wish-fulfilling cow, according to Hindu mythologies.

Of course we’re only theorizing here. It could be anybody’s guess, really. But given this tangent, it’s pretty feasible, don’t you think? What it does show is that gaming giants (spearheaded by the giants, no less) are beginning to tread more carefully into territories that are beyond their own.

Hopefully, though, this won’t keep them from creating games that are progressive. We don’t want them getting all too uptight and perpetually walking on non-existent eggshells. Cause you know, we can always get those at Easter.

The PlayStation 3 and PC versions of Fallout 3 were never slated for an Indian release.

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