Just a week ago, the Pan-European Game Information age rating body, aka PEGI, announced some sweeping changes to the way games are rated. More specifically, new categories that will be implemented that target addictive content and paid in-game content, such as loot boxes, the types of content that dominate some of the most popular games out there, such as Fortnite.
“This is, in terms of scale, quantitatively speaking, probably the most important update we've had in our history,” PEGI Director General Dirk Bosmans said. “We noticed that our first story about how these things might approach was clearly not enough anymore, so more needed to be done.”
However, don't expect the Entertainment Software Rating Board, aka the ESRB, America's equivalent of PEGI, to follow suit with updated rating guidelines for the titles it oversees.
As first spotted by Eurogamer, and as part of a discussion by The Game Business, the biggest reason the ESRB won't follow PEGI's lead is that it could be “confusing” for parents. Currently, adding labels to games is what the group believes is the best way to handle the situation.
“The ESRB's research suggests that parents want advance notice of features such as online communication and the ability to spend real money on in-game purchases, but that it can be confusing if non-content-related features affect rating category assignments,” a spokesperson said. “As such, there are currently no plans for the ESRB to allow any factors outside of the content and context of a game to affect the age rating.”
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For its part, PEGI understands the concerns and complexities of a rating system.
“We are aware of the concerns expressed by the ESRB. If we add this, are parents losing information?” PEGI Director General Dirk Bosmans said. “You want to inform them of both the content and the context of video games. But by incorporating both of those into an age rating, you have to be aware that you may not be able to provide all the levels of detail that you provided beforehand. This is a difficult exercise.”
That's why PEGI didn't include details about existing legacy software, because it's something “we want to find out properly,” Bosmans said. It doesn't help that some games that would fall into these new categories are constantly being updated, so things can inevitably change.
“We can't continuously check our back catalog,” Bosmans said. “However, we have been tracking the occurrence of in-game purchases and paid random items for the past seven years, which gives us a very interesting database.”
So what do the new PEGI ratings look like?
When these changes come into effect in June, the categories that will be looked at are as follows:
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In-app purchases
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Limited time or restricted items fall under this. That could potentially encourage developers to add features that disable purchases, which would cause their ratings to drop to compensate.
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Paid random items
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Basically, this is loot boxes and everything related to it, like gacha or card packs.
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Play by appointment
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This category will look at games that reward players for constantly returning and punish them if they end their daily login streak. Combat passes may fall under this.
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Online community
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This will mainly target games that have unlimited communication, or those that don't punish bad behavior.
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All of this will take place in June, and some of the biggest games around are already being noticed for the ratings they will receive under this system, including Fortnite or EA Sports FC, as well as others that we haven't considered that could be categorized as such.
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