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FTC and Rockstar Settle Hot Coffee Dispute
kukyfrope writes "The FTC and Rockstar/Take-Two have reached a settlement surrounding the 'Hot Coffee' mod for GTA: San Andreas that will serve to prevent future incidents. The FTC has stated that Rockstar and Take-Two must disclose all content to the ESRB when rating games, or face an $11,000 fine per violation if undisclosed content is discovered. 'Parents have the right to rely on the accuracy of the entertainment rating system. We allege that Take-Two and Rockstar's actions undermined the industry's own rating system and deceived consumers,' commented Lydia Parnes, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection."
This post is pure drivel and its heading points out a small problem with CSS redesign. The score of the post is all the way over on the right side and so can be "interrupted" by the title of the post. The score should be on the left hand side just like the other metadata about the post.
Who's the dumbass here? If you actually read what happened about Oblivion you'd know that Oblivion only got rerated because of the gore. The ESRB did a piss-poor job rating Oblivion and since somebody brought to their attention a nude texture, they looked over the game and found it to contain too much gore to be rated Teen. Don't believe me? Read this: http://www.gamespot.com/news/6148897.html
Yeah, they're still getting the nudity descriptor, but I think that was more of a thing to get people to shut up and stop arguing about it. Since the game was going to be rerated anyway, they figured the easiest thing to get the argument on whether the nudity should be accounted for was just to throw a nudity descriptor on it. An appeasement if you will.
For a market to exist the government has to enforce the law. Otherwise concepts like property and contracts become meaningless. In this case there was a contract between the ESRB and Rockstar that said "You assure us that what you've shown us is the worst stuff in the game and we let you use our 'Rated M for Mature' label". In the eyes of the government Rockstar failed to uphold its end of the contract and advertised compliance with a standard the product did not actually comply with, which means the buyer is misled to believe the product has a "feature" it does not actually have. I don't see what's against the free market here or do you mean free market means you can defraud the customer?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Hmm, what does this kind of sound like.....Oh yeah, Oblivion.
Bethesda submitted a 60 page document detailing the violence in Oblivion to the ESRB and it got rated T for teen. Then the nude female patch hit (3rd party), and the game gets changed to M for Mature.
Lord knows that it's ok for 13 year olds to see flaming corpses hanging from nooses in the depths of hell but not breasts.
The point is that the ESRB has recently made a huge mistake when having a detailed report of violence in a game. I'm not 100% positive that they would rate the next GTA game correctly after the Oblivion fiasco.