ESRB Ratings Across the Consoles Charted

Gamasutra has up an analysis by Matt Matthews looking at the distribution of ESRB ratings across several generations of consoles. He makes particular note of Nintendo's efforts with the GameCube and Wii: "On the GameCube over 51% of the games were rated E and 6.1% were rated E10+. This makes the GameCube appear to be more friendly for younger gamers ... From the beginning Nintendo has wanted to attract non-traditional gamers with its Wii hardware and software. Perhaps as a result of the manufacturer's strategy, many Wii games have been designed to appeal to -- and therefore are rated for -- a general audience. Over 82% of the Wii catalog is either rated E or E10+. Only 3.2% are rated M, less than half the rate on Nintendo's previous console, GameCube. Still, that 3.2% is significantly higher than the rates on either the Nintendo DS or the Game Boy Advance." Matthews makes a few offhand comments about the analysis on the Curmudgeon Gamer site, as well.

controller methods

[theMerovingian]

I bet Wii has to be more careful about the type of games it allows. If you had a ninja assassin game where you have to pantomime garroting a guard with the controller wire, it might cause parents to get upset!

Re:controller methods

[zuvembi]

If you had a ninja assassin game where you have to pantomime garroting a guard with the controller wire, it might cause parents to get upset!

So, you mean exactly what you do in Godfather : Blackhand Edition for Wii? Yes, one of your weapons is a garotte. You sneak up behind the guard, do a jerk apart of the nunchuk and wiimote, and then saw back and forth. It's a little disturbing the first few times you do it.

Of course, that would probably be the reason that it's an M-rated game that parents are advised not to buy young children. Of course, some people are stupid.

Mod Up

[Brothernone]

Parent is exactly correct. This is even a required part of a few missions. I think, honestly, that Godfather: Blackhand is a great example of a mature title for the Wii, utilizing the new types of control available. Great game, if a little awkward at times.

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[Lehk228]

i didn't even know this game existed until now,

WANT!

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[AlphaDrake]

Wasn't this one of the issues raised regarding the Manhunt 2 re-rating?

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[0racle]

Then those parents shouldn't have bought that game for their kids.

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[Dorceon]

'allows' was an interesting choice of words. Nintendo hasn't censored content on their platforms since the creation of the ESRB, with the exception of the AO thing that all the other platforms do too.

How is boxing not violent?

[MosesJones]

One thing that has confused me on the "E" rating is that for some reason boxing isn't considered violent. In Europe its a 7+ game but in the US its "Everyone". Now sure talking a shotgun to someone's head is definately at the top end scale of violence but surely pounding someone's head with your fists even after they start to go down is pretty damned violent too.

Now its not an M, but is punching people in the head really "E"? Even if its done cartoon style?

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[MBGMorden]

If it was street fighting, then yes, punching someone repeatedly is violent. However if done in a controlled environment however, it's a sport.

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[7Prime]

Ever watch old Warner Bros cartoons? Those things would be rated NC-17 for blood had they been real. Yeah, society has always been very lopsided when it comes to cutesy animated violence. And they may have a point, too, presenting violence in a cutesy animated way puts it farther in the realm of fantasy, and less likedly to be idolized in a realistic way. In the WB cartoon universe, dropping a 100 ton anvil on someone is about as harmful as giving someone a wedgy, and we've been okay with TV wedgies for yea

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[KDR_11k]

Ever watched Felidae [wikipedia.org]?

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[Anonymous Coward]

So where does it end, Jack?

Is Hockey only intended for a mature audience because of the body checking? What about football? They literally run into each other and TACKLE one another to the ground... ON PURPOSE.

Seriously, you people need to give this a rest.

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[antek9]

Pheww, for a moment I was thinking you were talking about football there, and no, it's against the rules to tackle someone to the ground in football, especially on purpose. You will see either a yellow or a red card if you do that. I was however quick enough to realize you were writing about that strange American variant of good ol' rugby instead that is kind enough to give its players a rest every 10 seconds of game play or so, because they are lugging around way too much body armor.

Oh, by the way, I do

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[LKM]

So where does it end, Jack?

Is Hockey only intended for a mature audience because of the body checking? What about football? They literally run into each other and TACKLE one another to the ground... ON PURPOSE.

Seriously, you people need to give this a rest.

Are you implying that tackling is not violent because it's being done in Football? The fact that some societies accept violence in some sports does not make said violence any less violent.

Well just to note

[Sycraft-fu]

"E" is somewhat the equivalent of "7+". Despite the "Everyone" designation the low end rating is actually "EC", Early Childhood.

In terms of why I think it mostly has to do with societal norms. There's isn't a perfectly objective way to rate content, just can't happen. As such ratings generally reflect the conceptions of the society they are in. That is to say what people would generally consider acceptable at a given level. This is also why nudity gets hit so hard in US ratings systems. The US has always ha

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[coppro]

It's also worth remembering that the ESRB is still quite subjective. They strive to ensure that their ratings are very consistent that the raters don't let personal issues provide an undue influence to them, but the ratings standard are largely based on whatever society thinks. A lot of the raters are mothers. They are rating the games partially on whether they'd want their children playing those games. So while the ESRB always tries to be consistent, the organization does not have specific, objective crite

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[xouumalperxe]

Actually, if you made a graphical representation of an @ slaughtering an f, it'd be just fine. But if your game realistically depicted a humanoid shredding a feline to pieces (can't be more specific than that, you only gave me characters, not colors! :), it'd be considered violent.

The @ and f example looks completely preposterous, but take, for example, the Worms series. You have a very graphic representation of chaos and mayhem, but it's ok because there's no implicit or explicit "real" violence there. E

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[billcopc]

You, sir, need to have a serious conversation with a 7 year old. Today's kids are a whole lot dumber and more ignorant than we were. Don't underestimate the social damage of political correctness.

Re:How is boxing not violent?

[G Fab]

You know what? Baloney.

Society gets to decide what is outrageous. We don't have to follow black and white rules and be logically consistent.

Society is outraged by shotgunning of people. Society is not outraged by two people agreeing to box each other for sport. A few extreme pacifists do say that this is akin to other violence sine you are physically harming another person, and they're right. It's violence, but society isn't outraged by it.

That's why boxing can be an innocent game for kids, because society isn't worried that kids will grown up thinking it's ok to box people who agree to participate for sport. They do frown on kids growing up thinking shooting other peopleis ok, and thus restrict very violent games to parents, so parents can be involved enough to tell kids.. hey, that's a game and this stuff isn't ok in real life.

Frankly, the system seems to work. I think society reinforces the message that boxing is ok and murder isn't. Some parents buy GTA for their kids and don't involved themselves enough to tell the kids that its topics are things that are not OK in real life... and sometimes these kids are sufficiently insulated from society that they don't get that same message... but kids with such awful childhoods aer probably going to be bad guys anyway.

I don't think it's fair to conflate all violence by simplistic definitions. They have to be cultural and based on societal outrage, because that's not informative of the true nature of the activity than rote logic application.

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[7Prime]

Boxing's got HUGE problems, especially these days. Back in the day, around the time of Muhammad Ali, Boxing was still looked at for some semblence of honor, and the strategy and sportsmanship were still valued. Many of the very best boxers, even today, are more strategy oriented than meadhead power mongers. But most of the boxing today is pretty much followed because lots of guys (and yes, I'm a guy myself) get off on watching violence... which I think is a big societal problem.

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[G Fab]

You're right. boxing has a serious problem and isn't the sport of honor it once was. The problem is that money and power are corrupting, and we aren't as educated a society. You see much the same in all entertainment. Music, football, acting, are all either full of less ethical people or at least the vices are not as concealed.

But even if Boxing is not good, it's not outrageous to be fan in the same way it is outrageous to like real murder. There's a huge distinction. First of all, you box other sport

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[aichpvee]

I always like the Yugioh game that my nephew had, rated "E for violence."

As Expected

[thetagger]

I think nothing says the PS3 and Xbox360 are geared towards a teenager audience more than the fact that they have so many "mature" games.

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[plague3106]

Um, wouldn't that mean they are geared more to adults? M is 17+. In other words, people are only "teens" for two years. Where-as the T rating is 13+. So why would a large number of M games indicate a teenage audience and not an adult one?

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[arodland]

Because the 13-18 crowd is the largest audience by far for "17+" games. People who are actually "mature" tend to find most of them less interesting.

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[plague3106]

Do you have an evidence of that? Further, do you have any evidence that the game companies honestly WANT 16 and under playing M rated games?

I find it interesting that you feel a game like Resident Evil wouldn't interest older players.

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[provigilman]

No kidding. I play Halo with a group of friends that are all older than I am, and I'm 27! I also played Bioshock, Mass Effect and I'm looking forward to Assassin's Creed and Resident Evil for the Wii (I never played the original games much, and I like the idea that they're making a game that basically runs you through it all...).

The idea that only teens are interested in M rated games is flawed. I mean, what are all the 30 year old gamers playing then? Phoenix Wright?

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[plague3106]

I'm almost 30 myself. RE: UC is out I believe. If you can, pick up a game cube controller and the GC versions of RE. I did this myself (after I played RE: 4 on the Wii first) since I never played any of the other RE games. I found them quite enjoyable (although RE2 has some pretty sad looking graphics / sound).

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[Dorceon]

When I first got my Gamecube, my plan was to play through the RE games in chronological order in the aim of eventually making it to RE4. I never made it through RE0 because of the tank movement and camera angles designed to make you fire precious ammo into the aether because you can't see enemies your avatar would have a plain view of. Playing the pre-4 games with a first person camera seems a lot more appealing to me.

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[7Prime]

Actually, yes, PW is mostly played by Adults... there's lots of nostologia factor in games like that.

But M is probably most widely played by 13-18 year olds. It's not so much that older gamers aren't playing them, but that many 13-18 year olds are playing NOTHING BUT M-rated games. Most teenagers won't even touch a T-rated game, because they're so damn eager to be considered an adult, and let's face it, M rated games tend to be more testosterone pumpers, and that's going to appeal to addolencents... there a

M-Rated games seldomly actually targeted at adults

[LKM]

Same age bracket, same gaming taste. Games like Phoenix Wright (btw, if you've played the first two games, you'll love the third, the final case is amazing), Okami or Mario Galaxy are not rated M, but I would guess that you'll find more adults playing them then teenagers.

While some "mature" games are great for adults (you mentioned Bioshock and Mass Effect), a lot of them are just dumb, bloody crapfests with breast physics thrown in to satisfy teens. M-Rated games are hardly ever actually targeted at adults

Phoenix Wright vs. Halo

[LKM]

The idea that only teens are interested in M rated games is flawed. I mean, what are all the 30 year old gamers playing then? Phoenix Wright?

???

I'm two years shy of 30, and I play Phoenix Wright, but no Halo. I think Halo is a pretty average FPS overrun by swearing homophobic kids, while Phoenix Wright is a well-written, engaging Adventure game for more mature gamers who are not adverse to doing some actual reading and thinking.

So I have no idea what you're trying to imply with your PW comment.

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[LWATCDR]

"Do you have an evidence of that? Further, do you have any evidence that the game companies honestly WANT 16 and under playing M rated games?"
You have got to be kidding me.
They want to sell games. If not why would they fight laws limiting there sales to adults like they do in several EU countries? If you think they actually care about any type of freedom. Sony????

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[7Prime]

Exactly. Remember that one way of making a product completely irresistable, especially to teenagers, is to dangle it in front of them and say, "you're not allowed to have this."

let's see, you're acting as an authority figure, speaking to a demographic that is, by nature (biologically), anti-authoritarian, and then you're telling them that they must wait until their older, and putting them down in the process. Does this make no-sense to anyone else but me?

I'm all for a rating system, FOR PARENTS. But leave t

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[LWATCDR]

"I'm all for a rating system, FOR PARENTS. But leave the legality out of it, it just doesn't work."
Why not they do it in Europe?

Children prefer Games targeted at Adults

[LKM]

Do you have an evidence of that?

Surveys have shown time and time again that teenagers prefer games and consoles ostensibly targeted at adults. This is the first one I found, after a bit of googling:

Survey: Children Prefer PS3 Most, Wii Least [kotaku.com]

It's not surprising, either. When I was young, Mortal Kombat was the shit because it had blood and decapitation and stuff. Nowadays, I play the games I actually like, not the ones that are most likely to impress my pals.

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[rkanodia]

This post of mine [slashdot.org] is only a month old, but I thought it would be worth trotting out:

The funny thing is, there's never really anything 'adult' about games that are rated 'Adults Only', nor is there anything particularly 'Mature' about games labeled such.

I figure at the rate things are going, there will one day be a game consisting solely of giant-sized genitalia doing battle with machine guns and bodily fluids while healing themselves with crack cocaine. The villain will be an undead mutant urethra, who rapes the players with his radioactive waste-spewing demon gonads and multifarious blood-dripping, sulfurous tube-like appendages, better known as 'Satan-tacles'. At that point, the ESRB will have to add a new category above 'Well-socialized And Upstanding Community Member' (which itself was created to categorize Puppy Molestors 4), probably named something like 'Confucian'. And the whole thing takes place in Hell.

Perhaps more specifically, the issue is that the ratings denote that the content is inappropriate for children, not that it's of interest to or worthwhile to adults. A game doesn't get rature 'Mature' for making the player think, or for trying to enrich them. It gets labeled 'Mature' for showing blood and guts, or boobies. I know that I used to confuse the two quite a bit. I think that, as a teenager, violent movies and

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[theMerovingian]

I figure at the rate things are going, there will one day be a game consisting solely of giant-sized genitalia doing battle with machine guns and bodily fluids while healing themselves with crack cocaine. The villain will be an undead mutant urethra, who rapes the players with his radioactive waste-spewing demon gonads and multifarious blood-dripping, sulfurous tube-like appendages, better known as 'Satan-tacles'

Thanks for the nostalgic flashback... that sounds like a GWAR video! :)

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[Aladrin]

Because that's the -rating-, not the audience. Teens buy M-rated games. Whether they do so directly, or by fraud, or by getting someone else to... It doesn't matter. They buy them.

Violence != Mature

[LKM]

Um, wouldn't that mean they are geared more to adults?

No. Actual adults are mature enough to play whatever the hell they like. It's teenagers who get off on playing violent games.

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[KDR_11k]

I think it's more of a graphical thing, 2d games generally get rated lower because sprites tend to look cartoony and violence doesn't look very detailled when the knife has 5 pixels to it.

I'd Prefer MPAA Style Ratings

[Apple Acolyte]

ESRB ratings sound so pathetically lame. Why not just use MPAA style ratings, which everyone likes (unless they're also copyrighted or something). . .

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[Phs2501]

The MPAA rating system is more tightly controlled than... something really tight. They have trademarks on each rating.

E10+

[tepples]

I had heard that ESRB ratings were actually more useful than MPAA ratings. Especially that catch-all PG rating.

As far as I can tell, MPAA::PG corresponds directly to ESRB::E10+.

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[king-manic]

ESRB ratings sound so pathetically lame. Why not just use MPAA style ratings, which everyone likes (unless they're also copyrighted or something). . .

because I'd like my game rating to reflect the contents of the game not the politics of the rater. The MPAA is one of the very worst ratings organizations out there. Almost every movies that gets a NC-17 gets a "mild adult" in most other markets. Some of the R rated movies gets a "Adults only" in other markets. The MPAA is easily influenced by money, panders to a sexually puritanical, mentally ultra violent ideal. The MPAA is not a good organization to pattern anything after.

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[k_187]

Yes, but every parent out there knows what an "R" movie entails. The ESRB doesn't have to grade games like the MPAA does, just license the grading scale.

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[corsec67]

I think the best idea is to not have an overall rating, but say how much of each category of objectionable content is in the game. The categories could be: Nudity, Sex, Violence, Blood, Swearing, with a 1-5 for little to a lot of each type.

RSAC lost

[tepples]

I think the best idea is to not have an overall rating, but say how much of each category of objectionable content is in the game. The categories could be: Nudity, Sex, Violence, Blood, Swearing, with a 1-5 for little to a lot of each type.

RSAC tried that [wikipedia.org]. ESRB won out over RSAC, and I'm guessing that a lot of it had to do with simplicity.

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[ShadowsHawk]

That's because people are too stupid or lazy to read the box. They would rather have it poorly summed up in a character or two.

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[tcolberg]

Would the change matter much? We assume people are ignoring ESRB ratings because they aren't as recognizable as MPAA's ratings. I went and saw American Gangster a couple weeks ago and saw more than a few young children and pre-teens in the audience, escorted by their parents. I know introducing children to adult content is at the parent's discretion, but maybe the issue is not that the ratings are insufficiently informative, but that there are many parents who simply don't care to regulate the content th

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[Homr Zodyssey]

That reminds me of when I saw the remake of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" a few years ago. There were two kids sitting in front of us, a boy and a girl. They couldn't have been more than 7. The boy was crying during the movie. The girl got up and walked out. She came back a little while later and I heard her telling the "adults" she was with "I called my mommy and she's coming to get me." I thought it was bad enough that someone took kids to this movie. But they took someone else's kids to the movie! And

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[Lynxara]

They're trademarked, the MPAA has taken action against unaffiliated websites that used the scale. Going to the MPAA system would probably result in the MPAA wanted to take over rating games from the current ESRB. This would not be a good thing.

Take it a step further...

[The Barking Dog]

...and give us the statistics on the percentage of overall sales for a console by ESRB rating. "M" rated games may be a smaller percentage of overall games for the PS3 or Xbox 360, but I'll wager that they account for a large percentage of the overall sales.

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[westlake]

"M" rated games may be a smaller percentage of overall games for the PS3 or Xbox 360, but I'll wager that they account for a large percentage of the overall sales.

It is interesting to see how the M rated game fares in competion with Mario and his friends:

Amazon.com Bestsellers In Video Games {9 PM ET November 30]

6 Call of Duty 4 [XBox]
11 Assasin's Creed [XBox]
16 Halo 3 [XBox]
28 Mass Effect [XBox]
42 Call of Duty 4 [PS3]
43 Assasin's Creed [PS3]
48 Call of Duty 4 {XP/Vista]
56 Madden NFL 08 [XBox]
57

More telling about Genre?

[Applekid]

IMHO the breakdown is more indicative of the types of games that are on the systems. If you look at the DS and GBA there are very very few FPS games and that genre tends to be slanted towards M ratings. Likewise, those systems have plenty of platformer type games which slant towards E.

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[JoshJ]

I suspect FPS games will become quite common on the Wii for obvious reasons over the next couple years.

And most of them will be absolute garbage pushed out solely to turn a buck.

Quake DS

[tepples]

If you look at the DS and GBA there are very very few FPS games

But the DS has Quake and more than a few mods [drunkencoders.com]. What other M-rated FPS do you need?

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[Applekid]

If you look at the DS and GBA there are very very few FPS games

But the DS has Quake and more than a few mods. What other M-rated FPS do you need?

Perhaps I should have written:
"there are very very few officially licensed FPS games"

It's obvious that homebrew and homebrew ports don't count since they didn't count for Gamasutra's analysis.

Not really a complaint that there needs to be more, mind you, I don't like the genre much, personally. More of an observation that there are more generic FPS games on PSP than DS or GBA.

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[Von Helmet]

Homebrew software? You might as well argue that failing to disclose hidden beta code that requires a 3rd party mod to unlock it is enough to get a game re-rated!

Wait... hold on...

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[KDR_11k]

Bioshock? The Half-Life series?

PC?

[Dr. Eggman]

Where's the PC graphs? We may not be the majority of the games out there, but we should not be marginalized! I would suspect a extremly different spread on the PC. Probably a lot more M and EC (early childhood.)

Ever hear of labels?

[daveisfera]

They should definitely put some labels on the pie charts next time, because it was next to impossible to tell which pie was for which console.

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[typobox43]

That's half the point of the article. They're not labeled the first time they're presented. Then, the next section repeats the same charts, this time with labels. The idea is to see how easy it is to predict which pie goes with which console.

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[x-caiver]

The pie charts on the first page, the ones without labels, were clearly -not- labelled deliberately. The text that went along with it was basically "can you guess which one goes with which console, we bet you can!", additional 'non labelled' charts had text including "Take a few moments...then go to the next page for the answers." If you were to go to the 'next page' you'd see the charts broken out with labels.

How is that possible?

[7Prime]

How many games does the Wii have now, anyway? I can count 5 M-Rated games off the top of my head: Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicals, Manhunt 2, Godfather: Blackhand Edition, and Medal of Honor 4. Wasn't Metroid Prime 3 also rated M, or was that T? There must be a few more. But I was under the impression that Wii games were at around the 100 mark, so how could a system with 5 M-Rated games, and around 100 games have only 3.2% M-Rated titles?

Two of those 5 were released within the last 2 wee

Flawed Methodology

[MorpheousMarty]

Who care what percentage of games are E for Everyone on each console? If the Wii is 90% E for everyone but has 10 games for it, the PS2 is still an order of magnitude more family friendly with 1% of 10,000 Games E for everyone. Also, average score should be taken into account, if the Wii is 90% shovelware but all the good E games are for PS3, it still isn't the best. Fanboys take a breath, Wii is my favorite console, but I'm 24 and play games for fun, E-AO. Families should base their decisions on the games,