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Why Is the Grand Theft Auto CEO Also Chairman of the ESRB?
donniebaseball23 writes In an editorial at GamesIndustry.biz, Brendan Sinclair asks an important question about the game ratings board in America. Should Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take-Two, which owns the Grand Theft Auto franchise and has been at the heart of the ESRB's biggest controversies of the last decade, really be serving as its chairman? "No matter how removed from the day-to-day running of the ESRB Zelnick might be, his current role invites accusations of impropriety," he writes. "It's the sort of thing any critic of the games industry can point to as a clear conflict of interest, and many reasonable outsiders would probably look at that as a valid complaint. At least when titans of industry in the U.S. become the head of the regulatory agencies that oversee their former companies, they actually have to leave those companies."
Probably for the same reason the people in charge of the MPAA, who rate movies, all work for the big companies in the movie industry?
"age-restricting" content ratings always have existed to selectively restrict competitors or undesired content. MPAA, ESRB, same thing.
Near as I can tell, every official "ratings" operation I've ever encountered has been, to paraphrase OWK, a hive of scum and villainy. Almost never do the ratings make sense, they pay absolutely no mind to the actual state of knowledge / interest / sophistication of young people, they routinely ok violence and they pull their virtual lace panties up over their own heads if sex rears its terrifying, world-destroying head... seriously, on the list of people I'd like to bitch slap until my hand hurts, ratings boards are right near the top.
Seriously. Ratings boards. Ugh.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Strauss Zelnick and Take-Two DO NOT OWN GTA. Take-Two is Rockstar's publisher. Rockstar owns GTA. But don't let basic research get in the way of a sensationalist click-bait article...