Sorry for the bump, but I came across some articles regarding Tomodachi Life that brought this issue back to my attention.
Mostly, I'm looking to see if someone with more experience in game development than me (I've only coded one full game so far, and a bunch of unfinished ones before that) to clarify this for me, because when I see Nintendo's statement, the only thing that comes to mind is "bullshit".
Here's what they say:
"Unfortunately, it is not possible for us to change this games design, and such a significant development change cant be accomplished with a post-ship patch."
Looking at the way the game works, I can't help but think that this is just a blatant lie. Now, I'm not going to pretend I know how patches work (as I've never had to create one), so that might affect the argument somewhat. In addition, I can't be 100% sure how Nintendo structured the game, but if they used any sensible design patterns, the following would hold.
Based on the fact that characters can unintentionally cross dress indicates that the ability to do so was an oversight on Nintendo's part. The fact that this oversight was present indicates something about the design - particularly, that they used inheritance to design their game, and that at the very least they have most of their code in common, with only minor differences. That means that the Mii's are structured in the following way:
Either that, or they have a "gender" property in the Mii object itself. Regardless, they share most of their code, and any relationship and dressing functionality is implemented in the Mii class itself. Then there's a bit of gender specific code for the relationship functionality, that likely looks something like this:
Code:
function startRelationship( other_mii )
if( other_mii.gender == this.gender )
return false;
Or you might have relationships defined in a function outside the scope of the actual Mii characters:
Code:
class God
...
function startRelationship( miiA, miiB )
if( miiA.gender == miiB.gender )
return false;
...
If we didn't have that line of code, a relationship could be started between any two mii's, regardless of gender. But this function would check if the Mii is already in a relationship, and whether the genders of the Miis are considered "appropriate" for a relationship. They just forgot to include this line when it came to clothes, so cross dressing is possible.
Pregnancy is handled in a different function altogether, and will have a check to see if the Mii is female.
Considering every character, whether male or female, is still a Mii, I honestly doubt that it would be more work than the removal of 2-3 lines of code and some testing to enable gay relationships in a game. And since the change is so small, I don't see why you can't push out a post-release patch for a change as simple as this, when Mass Effect 3 added an hour of content to the ending, and Sim City removed online DRM through a post release patch.
If you ask me, Nintendo's statement is bullshit, playing in on the ignorance of people about how development actually works.
Those are my 2 cents on the issue, and I'd love to hear back from someone more experienced with game development on if I'm right or wrong.