This is more about SNK but here goes. It's from an old thread of mine.
SNK in the U.S. had its ups and downs, one of the most memorable downs being when the U.S. Neo Geo home cart Samurai Shodown was censored and the blood was altered. The media made a fairly big deal out of the situation. Chad tells the story from his perspective:
"Yes, the Samurai Shodown debacle…that was the most painful time in my career at SNK. I had worked through all of the bad times and taken all of my lumps because I believed in SNK. Finally, SNK had a product worthy of its price tag and I, personally, had loved this game from the very start. Like many things, I had not known that they had decided to "censor" the home version. In fact, I could not even dream that this could happen. When I received the Samurai Shodown and found out it had been censored, it was like a knife had been rammed into my back. My whole world went into a downward spiral because I loved games and we had finally had something great.
I remember immediately talking to the president, Marty Kitazawa, at the time about this fiasco to try to find out what happened and what they were thinking. The only thing he told me was, "Yes, the home version is censored." I had also asked him what we wanted to tell everyone the reason was that we had censored Samurai Shodown, and to that, I received no answer. I was to be a good PR guy and make something up. Many different reasons for the "censorship" came out of SNK America and none of them actually became SNK's official word on this situation. I do remember the Beast Busters excuse and that was widely used. [Beast Busters was a previous SNK game that came under fire for being too violent]
However, I later found out the truth for the censorship, and although this was never used as SNK's official word, this was the truth. SNK, like many companies, [was] facing many lawsuits at the time. They were paranoid about being sued because they could not afford it financially. SNK started putting epilepsy warnings in the cartridges because Nintendo lost a big lawsuit over a case. At this time, there was much negative publicity for violence in video games and it eventually went to congress. One of the Mortal Kombat [games] at the time was censored. SNK was worried about a lawsuit or future lawsuit and decided to play it safe, because it could not afford not to."
Though the U.S. offices have been criticized at times for their business decisions, it is clear that some of this was unavoidable due to SNK of Japan's control and them dumping leftover product. In order to be more profitable in Japan, the company would force certain items on the U.S. office. The most well known example of this is the single speed CD systems that were sold from SNK of America even though a better, faster version of the system (the CDZ) was available in Japan. Still, outside factors were not the only negatives the U.S. offices had going for them. According to Chad, "The American divisions of SNK weren't exactly successful and from a business standpoint, it's easy to see why SNK Japan treated us like a broken arm."