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AO Rating Basically Bans Manhunt 2 From Release
Yesterday we discussed Manhunt 2's AO rating, and what it meant for the game's retail outlook. Gamespot points out that effectively an AO rating means that the game will never be released in the first place. "Both [Nintendo and Sony] forbid licensed third-party publishers from releasing games rated AO for Adults Only on their various hardware platforms. Though Manhunt 2 isn't slated for any of Microsoft's systems, the company has also confirmed that it does not allow AO-rated titles on the Xbox or Xbox 360. The sole exception to this rule was in 2005 when the already released Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was retroactively rated AO, at which point retailers pulled it from shelves and Take-Two suspended production of the game."
Could this be the time to change the console video game distribution model? Let the customers buy directly from them. The game cases can be very simply [one slip of paper in the from stating the game name], manual could be downloaded form their website in PDF format, etc. If they save all this money of the case/printing manual/cutting out the middle man could they sell the game for 30 or 40 bucks and still profit?
If they tried this model I would more then likely buy the game to support it.
With PC games, since you don't need Microsoft's, Apple's, NVidia's, ATI/AMD's, or Intel's blessing (dev kits and graphics hardware) to release games, ratings can actually be relevant (or irrelevant) since there are far more methods of distribution for the games (e.g., Steam, selling it online in general whether it be a downloadable or from a site like Amazon). With PC games, you don't need to self-censor yourself in order to publish the game (e.g., JFK Reloaded, all H-Anime games). Hell, you don't even need to get it rated by the ESRB! Just look at all the mods for games (e.g., Half-Life/2, Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, Unreal Tournament, The Sims) and games themselves (mainly indie games) that people play or buy that aren't rated.
As an argument against the ESRB's practises, however, look at other art and entertainment. Books aren't rated, yet they can be as grotesque (if not more) than Manhunt. Movies more grotesque and violent than Manhunt get away with an R rating (MPAA != ESRB, though). Not only that, but movies can be released as "unrated and uncut" (i.e., all extras haven't been MPAA-rated), yet the stores will still sell them. Hell, the news can be more grotesque on a regular basis than Manhunt, yet that doesn't get rated as TV-MA or anything like that!
If anyone has examples of other arts that have been effectively self-censored due to its rating system (e.g., a movie that was originally rated as NC-17 that had to tone it down to get R for a theatre release), please provide them. This is quite a hypocritical situation going on in the videogame world, but perhaps it used to be like this in another art and I'm just too young to have experienced that.
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Rockstar can chalk up the loss of a Wii sale.
The real problem here is will this set a standard for the future of ratings on the Wii. If a game like Manhunt can't appear on the Wii because of the way that you swing the controller to kill your pray is AO, then why wasn't Zelda? Because you're not killing humans? Okay, fine. Why not Medal of Honor? Red Steel? Personally I have no interest in playing any of the Manhunt series of games, but I believe the ESRB knows what they're doing.... I just hope this isn't the new precedence for rating Wii games. I don't want to play Manhunt, but I would love a Tenchu game or similar.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
The no licenses for AO games from the big 3 console makers seems quite two-faced to me. That is definitely a case of selling an "adult product" and then intentionally blocking products designed just for adults. I guess I don't understand why it would matter for content you view in the privacy of your own home.... What about all of those "unrated" DVDs that sell so damn well.
When it comes down to it the difference between an M and an AO rating is one freekin year... 17 or 18 years old... you can't tell me that SO much of their market rides on customers between those ages that they have to outright ban the deny the content on their platform...
You can guarantee that with all this press once the game does get toned down to an M rating it will sell like hotcakes... people love their barely legal.
Personally I have no interest in an AO game, but I would buy one if one were made available that interested me.... I would also go to see an NC-17 movie if I saw advertisements for one that interested me. While I can understand the reasoning behind extreme violence getting that kind of rating I find it quite troubling that so much as a single pixelated nipple is capable of breaking that point.... I mean it's not like it's something no one has ever seen before.
Collector's Edition
You say that now, and it's simple enough it seems. However, what if in the future, AO ratings start getting handed out more and more easily, due to people being paranoid over "the influence on children?" I mean, AO *does* stand for Adult-only, right? So maybe things might get to a point where any game that seems inappropriate for children will start getting AO ratings. For example, I could easily see God of War 2 having earned an AO rating, under a little more harsh of a comity. Now, so far, that right hasnt been abused. But people like Jack Thompson are pushing awfully hard to see that it IS abused. For example, the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas being retroactively tagged "AO".
And I say your movie-theatre comparison is flawed. It's more like if someone made said snuff film, and then were told they werent allowed to put it on VHS, DVD, HD-DVD, or Blu-ray, because they all had proprietary licensing schemes to them. Once you've eliminated someone from using any accepted form of distribution for a product... it's simply a lockdown. Censorship always start out small. It's the future implications of it that I think people are so concerned over. Maybe it's time to put some limits on the outdated notion that once someone makes a console, they have control rights over all the media that comes out for that console (maybe not, Im not saying Im on that side, just playing devil's advocate). Also, this is exactly why people here are/were so against blu-ray for so long, because of the proprietary licensing control Sony has over blu-ray. If proprietarily licensed mediums become all of the prominent ones, then we could very realistically reach a case where movies were declared "Too inappropriate", and werent allowed to be distributed at all.
An inch at a time, my friend. An inch at a time.
You still don't seem to get it.
Talks about how "they" wanted to ban it, "they" found a back door, etc, are good and fine until you realize who "they" are. _Again_, it's not some government organization that gave that AO rating: the ESRB is the gaming industry's own voluntary asociation. It answers to noone else.
So who are "they"? You're trying to tell me that the rest of the game producers were conspiring against Take Two? Or what?
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"You apparently don't remember the time back in the early '90s when Nintendo wouldn't allow the release of Mortal Kombat on the SNES. And then it was finally released without blood or the gruesome fatalities. Back then, no one played Mortal Kombat for the fighting aspect: we wanted to see Sub-Zero rip someone's head off with the spine still attached!"
Interesting that you bring that up. MK caused such an uproar that Nintendo reversed that policy for MKII. The SNES ended up with the best version of it.
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Believe it or not, this is a huge improvement over the way things were back in the day of the NES. It used to be far worse. Nintendo wouldn't even publish NES games containing the word "Kill".
More here:
http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/maniac.html
They are catering to the demographic with the money to buy the console- from what I've seen, far more adults buy game systems for their children than buy the system to play themselves.
I'm 28, and I own a PS2, Wii and a 360. I have no children. It's just myself and the fiancee. We have a lot more expendable income on average than our friends with children, and we buy a lot more games because of it. Out of all the people I know buying games, most are buying for themselves and not children (including our friends with little ones.) Most of the kids old enough to play games just have some form of GameBoy, while the consoles are for the adults.
On a side note, the new Paper Mario for the Wii is great. It's not quite as hard as I'd like platform wise, but it's still been grabbing most of my game attention lately. A lot of the humor in the game children wouldn't get, and for a Mario game the story is pretty grim and complex.
rm -rf
Same here. All this is going to do is drive games like Manhunt 2 for online purchase and even then some group is going to whine and complain when one of their precious unique-as-a-snowflake Ritalin addicts happens to see five seconds of it. This is all so very pointless. Plus, I'm guessing Microsoft is going to port it out to the 360. Why not? This would finally establish them as the Adult Game System for the Next Generation.
The bible says that owning slaves is OK, it is OK to stone people to death for eating shellfish or working on the sabbath. God told the Jews to commited genocide of the people of Jericho. Look into the old testimat, and you can find all kinds of crazy stuff.
Should we give the Bible an "Adults Only" rating?
Sure it is, and I'm glad. If you haven't noticed, Nintendo has been very candid about how they feel videogames should play a role in our lives. Miyamoto, whose philosophical ideals make him about the equivalent, for video games, as Frank Zappa was for music, is basically at the heart of their message. They don't send him out to talk about his philosophy for nothing.
I have to dissagree. Maybe Sony and Microsoft have little ethical mission, but you can bet your ass Nintendo does. I happen to agree with them 100%, so I'm just going to cheer them on (I'm glad to see a company really have an overall "vision" the way they do), but I can understand that others might be pissed.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
You could not have crosses or other recognizable religious symbols. They also had a list of "dirty words" you could not use... Not even something like "ass".
If you had a high score table and permitted the player to enter a name, you had to do a "bad word" check to prevent dirty words from being entered as a name.
This even applied to password codes. They made you remove some letters, like F, so that there was no chance of an algorythmically generated password ending up spelling "fuck", "fuk", "fuc", or "fuq" (or other such words).