At a gathering of politicians in Washington DC. the head of Electronic Arts and the chairman of the Entertainment Software Rating Board, John Riccitiello, explained the need for a universal rating system. One that would span all countries and platforms, according to Polygon.
Riccitiello was quoted as saying:
"In the past three years the audience for games has grown from roughly 200 million, to over one billion. Virtually everyone on the planet who owns a phone, can play a game. The Supreme Court has given us the same First Amendment rights as authors, musicians and film makers — a set of rights which we cherish.
But as we are so often told: With great freedom, comes great responsibility. To live up to that responsibility, we need to do a better job informing the consumer, no matter the channel, the platform or the geography. We must adopt a self-regulated, global rating system across every format games are played on."
For the past three years, Riccitello has struggled to get various movers and shakers in the game space to adopt the ESRB's ratings. Specifically Apple, Google, and Facebook. Whereas the traditional game industry has been using the ESRB ratings since 1994. Progress is being made, but it's a slow.
While Apple has refused to publicly state anything on the matter, it could be argued that their "walled garden" policies is enough to ensure that the wrong games do not get into the hands of the wrong players, but Riccitello believes that this is not good enough.
As Riccitiello also states:
"We must move beyond the alphabet soup of game ratings and consolidate behind a single standard that consumers will recognize and, ultimately, demand."
Another party that would definitely love to see a uniform system, across all continents, is game makers. Especially indie devs, who must break the bank when it comes to getting their games rated in outside markets. Each part of the world has their own procedure, which also includes some kind of hefty fee.
That alone might be a reason why a truly universal ratings may never happen, since the current system is huge money maker for many, and said parties might not want to see that change any time soon.
