Australia Likely To Get 18+ Game Rating 55
hypnosec writes "Australia is set to update the age rating system for video games, adding a new 18+ category which should allow for the more violent games to be sold in the country. The current maximum age rating for a console or PC game is 15+. If a title didn't meet the specifications for this age it was denied a rating and was therefore not allowed to go on sale. This didn't necessarily mean the game never hit the shelves, but it could only do if tweaks were made to remove some of the most violent or questionable content. The first parliamentary session in the new year is set for the 7th February — giving the poor fellas a nice long break — where the bill to introduce the new age rating will be voted on by the lower house. If it passes there, it will go on to the senate, which has the ability to pass it into law."
Better read the article (Score:5, Funny)
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Convicts, Kangaroos and extreme gratuitous violence or gratuitous sexual violence just don't mix? ; ).
More info http://www.r18games.com.au/ [r18games.com.au]
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It is! [gotsmile.net]
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Yes, the headline is open to misinterpretation. The article is really about a new game called Australia, which will probably get an 18+ rating. Game must be pretty obscure, because I've never heard of it, so I'm not sure why it made the Slashdot headlines.
Sanity to prevail? (Score:5, Insightful)
On the face of it, it looks like sanity might finally prevail. And in all likelihood, it probably will.
There's just this little nagging worry at the back of my mind that after going through the political process, what might happen is that a bunch of games that would previously have been released as 15+ will now be released as 18+ and that games which couldn't have been released before... still won't be able to be released because the 18+ guidelines won't actually be much/any more permissive than the old 15+.
But that's just paranoia, right? Perhaps somebody with more knowledge of Australian politics and their ratings system could provide comfort.
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Re:Sanity to prevail? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Sanity to prevail? (Score:4, Insightful)
This will also drive online sales for 18+ games. Likely a lot of 18+ games will simply never hit the shelves in the original format, as parents will notice they are unsuitable for minors, rather than wallowing ignorance and buying unsuitable games for their children. So most brick and mortar versions will be adjusted to lower the rating and gain access to a larger market and those sold online will be original versions (strict rules on contracts with minors in Australia so, Adult only contracts for online sales).
Re:Sanity to prevail? (Score:5, Insightful)
Likely a lot of 18+ games will simply never hit the shelves in the original format, as parents will notice they are unsuitable for minors, rather than wallowing ignorance and buying unsuitable games for their children.
I don't think that parents will stop the 18+ games from being stocked. Most of the people I see in the computer game stores are adults. In Australia, the average age of a gamer is 32 years old. 75% of gamers are aged 18 or more. Source: Australian gamers getting older and wiser, Oct 2011 [theage.com.au], or download the full report [igea.net].
As an aside, here is a suprising finding from the article:
63 per cent of gaming households play on a dedicated gaming console, 62 per cent play on PC, 43 per cent play on a mobile phone, 13 per cent on a gaming handheld and 13 per cent play games on a tablet computer.
So much for PC gaming being dead.
Re:Sanity to prevail? (Score:4, Insightful)
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The date of birth of the licence holder is repeated in the card background.
A red box surrounds the facial image.
A reference to the date of the holder’s 18th birthday appears in the banner of the card.
I can't speak for other states (I know Queensland looks sort've difficult to fake), but considering the majority of the population reside in
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Anyone that thinks PC gaming is "dead" isn't exactly firing on all cylinders.
Yes, sometimes ports are done poorly, but not always. I actually much prefer the menus in Skyrim to those of Oblivion and Morrowind, even if they obviously were designed to work well with joypads.
Once modding becomes common on consoles (surely it has to happen eventually) then the only thing PCs will really have going for them - and against them - are adjustable graphics levels though.
I didn't even have a PC that I gamed on for a f
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PC Gaming has one thing going for it that console games will never really have, a huge range of discounted really cheap games delivered by steam etc ie less than $10 dollars. What kills discount console games, the console licence fee. Also PC games leave you TV free to play DVDs in the background.
Guess who in reality attacks PC games, not the games manufacturers but M$, Sony and Nintendo. The only time I have ever had a game console was prior to the advent of game capable PCs and have not had one since.
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Haha.. I have almost the exact opposite experience to yours :p
You can get PS1 games and budget PSP/PS3 games on the PS Store. Likewise with the Wii Console thing and Xbox Live. Not as big a selection as old PC games though obviously, but what is there is usually the cream of the crop type thing.
I have my PC hooked up to the HDTV in the lounge, so that doesn't apply to me.. though I have an identical HDTV in my room, so it kind of does..
My first computers were heavily used for games.. Commodore 128, Amiga 50
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WOW! 194% of Australians are gamers!
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WOW! 194% of Australians are gamers!
That's overpopulation for you!
(And just in case you were serious, it is due to gamers owning more than one gaming device)
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The people chosen to be surveyed have been picked from a pool from an online survey company.
It is true that they conduct the survey online, and like all surveys you should be wary of the results (especially when they are conducted for an organisation with an angle). But in this case it is run by a large, established market research company [nielsen.com]. This is not just a backyard operator extrapolating results from just 50 respondents. The participants come from the same pool of people who take part in their offline market research.
A 8 year increase in the average age of a gamer in 6 years?
Given the huge explosion of gaming capable being owned by traditionally non-ga
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Well, in this area I'd expect it to work more like in the US/UK, where some non-specialist retailers decide not to stock 18-certificate products - I think Walmart is a good example here. I'd be very surprised to hear of a specialist entertainment bricks and mortar retailer deciding to avoid 18-cert stuff. So far as I know, that only happens in countries which have much more draconian sales regulations - basically stating that the titles in question can't be put out on display.
More of the same (Score:3)
Re:More of the same (Score:5, Insightful)
More of the worlwide tendency: governments wanting frantically to control what people see, hear, read, have access to, and do.
Haven't you got that backwards? This is the government making more content available that was previously banned.
A game? From a shelf? How deliciously absurd. (Score:5, Insightful)
Governments have always done that since there have been governments.
What you're seeing today is governments scrambling to stuff the internet genie back in the bottle.
As for this story, by censoring mature games people are forced to pirate, so the government simply lose out on the sales tax of those who would have bought.
Let me just clarify something here for you all. (Score:5, Informative)
"Australia is set to update the age rating system for video games, adding a new 18+ category which should allow for the more violent games to be sold in the country"
While it's good they are fixing a stupid problem, no one BUYS games here anymore, everyone I know is all over international mailing services. Where I can buy games overseas at HALF the cost they are here - and that's not from Asia either, I'm talking US / UK releases of the games. PS3 is region free (thank you Sony for something smart) and X360 AU is compible with UK releases. Plus Steam - when they do rip us off here (normally other publishers, not Valve) we get our US friends to gift them to us at a sensible price and pay them back via paypal.
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Sigh, fucking punctuation cutting shit out on this site.
My opening sentence had the following words after the quotes.
"for approximately 90 to 130$ US"..........
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Not to mention russian key sites... :)
It's a pretty tall order asking us for $100 AUD when the aud hit parity with the US dollar ages ago. And their Skyrim was $50 on steam.
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I live in Holland and here it's the same. Usually games are much less $ in the US than they are â in my own country, so I buy them in the US. It usually takes less than a week to get them here, too.
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That â was meant to be a Euro sign. Thank you /., for still not supporting the Euro after TEN YEARS!
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use € to get a euro sign. like so, €
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I buy on Steam, and this will fix a lot of games showing as 'unavailable in your region'.
Of course there are ways around that for games I really want to play, but it'll be more convenient if I can just get them on Steam.
Violence? More about nipples (Score:4, Funny)
I'm ok with mutilations but nipples? No way, I hope they go back with this measure, no nipples should be hidden from all mankind, forever!
Re:Violence? More about nipples (Score:4, Informative)
In Australia no.
If you read the classification guide, the guideline from G to MA15+ is: "Nudity should be justified by context. Nudity must not be related to incentives or rewards." i.e. it cannot be "collect 12 badger skins to see my labia". The proposed R18+ guidelines allow for incentive related and contextually unjustified nudity of course (up to and including actual footage of human genitalia), but there was never a general prohibition on nipples, or wang, scrot or vag for that matter. It was always either violence or drug use that got games banned in Australia, apart from BMXXX, which was considered "contextually unjustified nudity" to the censorship board and just about every game reviewer that played it.
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We each need to take a long hard look at how these regulations have the ability to touch our personal lives and keep abreast of pertinent legislative measures.
By the way, game prices in Australia (Score:4, Interesting)
Why is it so expensive? Taxes?
Or just good old price fixing?
I am a European, now living in Japan, and have ordered a lot of stuff from the US over the years. While I can figure out most factors for explaining game prices in these 3 regions (the 1 USD = 1 GBP = 1 EUR "special exchange rate", VAT differences, margins lower in the US vs rest of the world aka price fixing), I still cannot make sense of the outrageous prices in Australia...
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It's a result of when the AUD was back at USD0.60, the games market was establishing itself. The current price points were established, so people became used to playing around AUD$99 for a new release game. Now that the AUD is around USD1.05, the distributors still want to keep the same price point, but pocket the windfall from the exchange rates.
The distributors worst nightmare is setting the price point at AUD50 only for the exchange rate to go back to USD0.60.
The typical cycle is when the exchange rat
Re:By the way, game prices in Australia (Score:4, Informative)
Nope it ain't taxes, it's simply "pricing at the levels the market will bear", plus the fact that pricing hasn't been adjusted to account for currency fluctuations.
Ten years ago, the AUD was worth half of what the USD was. Back then, our game prices were double (in raw numbers) US prices (e.g. a game that was $50 in the USD was $100 here, or so). No issues there - that is roughly the same amount after you converted the currencies.
However, now, the AUD is worth slightly ~more~ than the USD. So it's more than doubled in value in the last decade. But game prices haven't changed (much). They are still 50-80% higher than US prices (in raw numbers). Thing is, that's what people always bought games at. So companies, to an extent, get away with it because the actual numbers on the price tag haven't really changed (or in fact, they've decreased, but nowhere near as much as would account for the change in currency value).
Some are blissfully unaware of how much cheaper games overseas are (or simply don't pay much attention to the news and realise just how strong our dollar is now compared to what it used to be). Some are aware, but simply don't care because they have enough disposable income not to worry about it (the average Aussie has more disposable income than, say, the average American, and is used to paying higher prices for almost everything - food, clothes, cars etc.) Others, like myself, say "screw that" and simply purchase over the Internet from the US (or use a US-based Steam account or something), and save themselves a healthy chunk of change. More and more people are doing this and it's starting to become a mainstream issue (not just games but all kinds of things - retailers here are complaining about everyone importing stuff and arguing that sales tax/GST should apply to imported goods etc.)
The other factor is that, Australians are still buying at those high prices. If people simply refused to pay, well, prices would come down. But retailers aren't gonna do that without good reason ... they're looking to turn maximum profit after all.
The final thing is that the AUD, although strong now, is an incredibly volatile currency. It may be 0.80 EUR and 1.05 USD now, but in any economic crisis (such as the one that could easily unfold in the Eurozone this year), it will collapse as investors rush back to safehaven currencies like USD and JPY (which is stupid, really, as the AU economy is far stronger than the US or JP economy ... but currency traders don't really care about that). So if they reduced prices to US levels, and suddenly our dollar lost 40% of its value in a few weeks (which has happened before, and indeed, has happened within the last few years), then what? They'd have to raise prices back up, and THAT would create a huge controversy (far more so than failing to simply reduce prices in the first place).
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Oh and retail overheads are huge in Australia. Even compared to Europe. Minimum wage is ~$16/hr, but almost noone actually gets paid that. Most retail jobs are paying $19/hr at minimum - more for casual staff. I was getting $22/hr stacking shelves 10 hours a week at my local supermarket throughout my university years, for instance. And that doesn't include the compulsory retirement (superannuation) payments that the employer also has to make on your behalf (so add another 9%, at minimum)...
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Thanks for your (and the other guys posting as ACs) detailed answers.
So it's mostly a ratchet effect on the foreign exchange, with massive impact because of AUD/USD volatility.
It sucks that online platforms such as Steam are playing that game and not allow you to buy in USD at US prices... Well it also sucks for me to some extent (although online prices in Japan are not so bad - almost in sync with the US, the selection is limited, with AAA titles such as Arkham City missing for obscure reasons, etc). There
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Cheap games as soon as they are released.
Sometimes older games do get cheaper in store, but it depends on the situation and what game.
Keep in mind a lot of people still buy games in a store because they are concerned about region locking. For those who aren't sure which platforms have it:
PC obviously has no region locking
PS3 has no locking whatsoever (you are free to import to your heart's desire)
X-Box has some region locked games, but 3/4 are unlocked (