Earlier this week, parts of the web were shocked to hear ESRB president Patricia Vance decree that downloadable content must not "go out of bounds" by introducing new elements that might change the game's maturity rating. Whether an attack on developers' free speech or merely a money sink for publishers forced to pull and relabel games that the ESRB would be forced to re-rate, the situation looked rather sticky -- but today, Vance clarified her controversial statement.
As it turns out, DLC will only affect the rating of the original game if the user is required to download it. For optional content, the ESRB is envisioning a separate rating:
Companies are free to offer downloadable content to their games as long as the pertinent content is the same as the core product. If it isn't, they have to submit it to the ESRB. If the downloadable content earns a more restrictive (higher) age rating, and it is of an optional nature, it must display the new rating prior to the user downloading it. The core product's rating won't change, unless the new downloadable content is part of a required patch, as is typically the case with MMOs that must be patched in order to play.
This raises some interesting possibilities. Without the evil eye of an unnamed brick and mortar keeping adult gaming more or less the pasture of the Japanese, this development potentially allows us to have our M-rated GTA IV and an Adults Only expansion pack on the side. Coffee, anyone?
While the policy still raises some questions (namely, how publishers are expected to display DLC ratings, how consumers will react when not every piece of DLC has a label, and what the ESRB plans to do about user-generated DLC), it seems clear that it falls in line with the ESRB's traditional stance of self-regulation, and is generally intended to keep publishers from having a loophole through which to release their more controversial content.
Leave a Reply