Xalavier Nelson Jr. is a popular indie dev and known shitposter, and his latest marketing campaign for Strange Scaffold’s Sunshine Shuffle, a game about cute critters retelling the tale of them robbing a bank, may have gone a step too far.
Sunshine Shuffle, due to launch in a couple of hours, has been banned on the Nintendo eShop and in South Korea. Nelson Jr. says in a TikTok that he has “goofed too close to the sun” and has accidentally convinced Nintendo the game enables child gambling when it’s actually not about teaching kids to gamble at all.
But will this deter Nelson Jr. from shitposting in the future? We asked him. “For this to stop me from shitposting, I would first have to find a distaste for the miraculous horror of legally-pursued shenanigans,” he tells Dot Esports. “I do not see this happening in the near future.”
It’s easy to see why his TikToks have Nintendo and South Korea concerned (Not a sentence I ever thought I’d type). TikToks such as this could definitely be misconstrued as stating the game is teaching kids to gamble since it all looks like that painting of dogs playing poker.
Fortunately, Nelson Jr. sees the funny and absurd side to all this and is using it to his and his studio’s advantage. “It’s not great for my hairline,” says the bald Nelson Jr. “I’d rather be an indie game with an interesting story behind it—one that respects the absurd spirit, skill, and dignity of my team—than have an utterly smooth launch on a game that’s easy to fit into a little conceptual box, and will just as quickly be forgotten.”
To clarify, the game contains no microtransactions of any kind and teaches kids not to gamble, something he has now told Nintendo several times. He expressed his appreciation for the support Nintendo has given him, despite the current circumstances, and admits this is all “objectively funny.”
The marketing is clearly working though, because here I am writing about it and here you are reading about it. You can still get the game on PC via Steam, and hopefully, you’ll be able to find it on the Nintendo eShop soon.
Updated 6:41am CT, May 24, 2023: Correction, Sunshine Shuffle isn’t about teaching kids not to gamble. Xalavier Nelson Jr. tells us, “It isn’t about teaching kids not to gamble. We just uh, we can’t control if kids learn to gamble from it. We don’t teach kids to gamble… on purpose.”
