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."

Comments

Same reason as MPAA

[Jax Omen]

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.

Take-Two does not own GTA

[Piata]

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...