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PEGI gives Balatro an 18+ rating for gambling imagery
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this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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PEGI and many other groups are private groups. They're not an authority of any form. They're not associated with government, public regulation, or public election. They're a group of people that create their own standards outside of the ISO or any actual regulation representing the public.
Some countries do have actual public systems, but many just have these private groups that know best.
This is all well and true, but it's important to note that these organizations exist as a sidestep to regulation, they are formed by industry insiders as a promise to the regulators that they will be honest about how they rate games (or movies or music) so that the government doesn't actually get involved and do it's job.
It's a form of regulatory capture that allows the industry itself to decide what is harmful to us.
It's basically the definition of conflict of interest.
They're private groups that do the ratings but ESRB is enforced by laws in some Canadian provinces for instance and PEGI is enforced by law in some European countries. They do have a de facto authority in those places as a publisher can't just decide to disregard their ratings and sell to minors anyway or something.
In Austria PEGI is "enforced" in Vienna while USK is "enforced" in Salzburg (and Germany, the reason why they buy all their games here). And PEGI might be shit, but USK is a million times worse.
USK rated Balatro with a minimum age of 12 because of "elements resembling gambling". Sounds more reasonable to me than the PEGI rating.
German Authorities (technically not USK but USK is affiliated to them completely banned Wolfenstein, Dying Light, etc. Not 18+ or whatever it's straight up illegal to promote or openly sell them in Germany.
I can kind of understand Wolfenstein, as Germany does seem to have this thing where they do and also don't want to face their past.
But Dying light is a generic zombie game.
Yeah, it's always stupid what ends up there and what doesn't. And because of Germany's stupid laws the German version often ends up worse than other versions (often even removing the English language option) (And people are surprised that we hate our northern neighbors...)
Here's a (non-exclusive) list of banned games in Germany (it's in German but the game titles should make it accessible to people that can only speak English): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategorie:Indiziertes_Computerspiel
Oh yeah, Half-Life was indexed in Germany until 2017 (coincidentally when they switched from Elke Monssen-Engberding to someone less grumpy (half of the stupid decisions coming from Germany just stem from some grumpy old person who's entrenched in a Department))