For years the ESRB rating system has sort of been the sole arbiter of how age-appropriate any given game is but times are changing
Today with the flood of games for the mobile social and tablet world as well as the vast increase of games
We're seeing digitally distributed on services like steam
There's just no way for the ESRB to keep up on top of that the ESRB
Charges a fee to rate games as they have to go over a video sent to them from the developer by hand and this fee
Is prohibitively expensive for small studios or people just trying to break into the market so what do we do?
After all as an industry we do need some way for players to be able to get a vague idea of what sort of content
They'll be getting when they pick up one of our games
parents need some way to tell if a game is
appropriate for their children and all of us at a glance need some way to tell if a title is going to contain things we
might find objectionable
[so] what's the solution well luckily the first step in solving this problem is quite easy in fact many companies?
Including the ESRB are already doing it
And that's to have a checklist of content that the player might want to know about before picking up the game such as alcohol use
Nudity or Explicit violence and have the developers fill out this content checklist before launching their game this puts the entire burden of rating games
on developers thus spreading the burden around and making it feasible to rate every game that comes out without making the process too expensive for
Anybody to do but how do we keep people from cheating the system?
After all there are plenty of unscrupulous developers out there who might want to get themselves a lower rating well
That is the hard part mostly because it means we're going to have to agree to use the same system
And then we're going to have to give it some teeth so first off
We need all the digital distributors steam,
gog, Facebook, the app store, Google play, and so on to agree to a
Universal checklist a standard set of questions that every developer has to answer before they can even get their game onto one of these stores
This checklist can then generate a general?
minimum recommended age for a product
Similar to how the ESRB currently rates games once you have that you'll have all games required to get a rating before they can go
Live anywhere, but that's not quite enough. We're still going to make sure that developers either by error or by choice
Don't miss rate their games
[so] next we have to have all of these distributors integrate a system where players can flag miss rated games if a game for example
Contains a fairly explicit sex scene that the developers failed to include on their rating list thus garnering a lower recommended
Range for the title players could flag it for inaccurate rating and from a drop-down box pick
Sexual content as the reason why if you wanted to get really slick?
You could even give the user a comment box where they could say exactly where in the game this content was found once enough people
Have flagged this content then the game would be subject to review by an independent body
Potentially the ESRB if this group deemed that the complaints were justified the title would then be suspended from all?
Services for 30 days and wouldn't be returned to the services until the rating was amended to reflect the issues found with the game this
Would heavily disincentivize people from trying to circumvent the rating system because the cost of being suspended from these services for a month would be?
disastrous for most games
But at the same time the system wouldn't fall prey to user abuse either even if some call of Duty VS.
Battlefield Fanboy flame war were to break out and spill over into this area they couldn't just get a game auto banned by flagging it
enough times because a real human reviewer would have to get involved before any real consequences were doled out and
Since the number [of] titles that would require this rating review process would likely be relatively small the digital distributors could probably foot the bill
for the rating review submission without too much pain
And if necessary to offset the cost they could even charge a fee to any developer found in appropriately rating their games before that Dev
Could put games back on their distribution services of course this system
I'm proposing isn't without its own problems the two major issues with this system
Is that one it doesn't work for retail products and two a mis rated game could only be corrected after launch [rather] than before it
the first of these two problems isn't
Particularly concerning as we already have a perfectly workable system that we've been using for years to rate retail products and while there may be
Some changes that we'd want to make to the existing Esrb system
There's no reason not to continue using it as to the second issue
I think you'd see all the biggest titles still get ESRB ratings for retail purposes anyway
So if we don't have to worry about those which just leaves the smaller games and while it's true that these titles might not always
Be perfectly rated when they go live at least they would have some rating rather than none at all which is the case today
Additionally a system like the one I've proposed is apt to catch any errors before a game really grows to reach a wide audience
And the last thing a developer wants is to see their games suspended from the distributors
Just as it was taking off again more incentive for developers to take that rating checklist seriously, so to answer the opening question
How do we rate the flood of that are being created today?
Fundamentally we ask the developers to do it
we just make sure that they do it right by getting all the
Distributors to use their power as the means of access to games to make sure that the devs do it right?
Get you all next week! *outro plays*