Obligation to put age rating on game?

Kilgore__Trout

Hi,

Scouring the net looking for info on whether game developers are obligated to provide an age rating with a game, and whether there are risks involved for not doing so? Haven't come up with anything concrete, and since a game will be available anywhere in the world, the laws of multiple regions might come into play. My suspicion is that devs are not obliged (seems to be a requirement for boxed games, rather than downloadable ones), but I'd like to know more.

The game I'm working on has no blood or sexual content, references to drugs, alcohol, tobacco, or anything else that's a bit of a laugh. It is a shooting game, though, against non human enemies, but a few mild swear words is about as far as it goes. Think I've read somewhere that rating is in the region of 1,000s, depending on game, so it's not really an option anyway.

http://www.esrb.org/ratings/faq.jsp#2 : Suggests rating is voluntary, but some brick and mortar retail chains demand it. Also, ESRB seems to cover North America

http://www.pegi.info/en/index/id/26 : PEGI is the European counterpart. Says that "The PEGI rating system is a voluntary system. It is only backed by legislation in a few countries. In others, however, PEGI is usually treated as being virtually mandatory by nearly all of the game retailers in their company policy."

I've seen a lot of quite violent, unrated games on steam, so I'm guessing it's not mandatory. Still, would like to understand it a bit better.

Anyone?

RedXIV

Ratings are not mandatory for the games and you will not be persecuted for not having a rating on your game. The primary reason for the ratings is that SOME regions will not let you physically sell a game there without a rating, and some institutions won't either.

Notably, Australia is massive on this, any game sold physically in that country is required, by Austrailian law, to be independantly rated. Germany has something similar.

Gamestop also has it on its list of requirements when stocking physical copies of games but I'm not sure how well thats enforced.

Digital downloads seems to remove a lot of these needs but presumably if you ever want to go on a platform like Steam, they may have requirements in this area.

Learned all this working for Activision

Kilgore__Trout

Some very useful info here. Thanks, RedXIV.

Doodee

You will require a USK rating for releasing a game in Germany. Its a legal requirement over there. Especially if it will be shown in public.