ESRB trying to curtail early game reveals

by Terrence Stasse { Jun 20th 2008 at 1:00AM }

It's the end of an era. For a long time now the Entertainment Software Ratings Board has been a great source for spotting games that had not yet been announced. This was entirely due to the open system that was used by the ERSB's site, which allowed anyone to check a game's rating as soon as it had received one. While this was in keeping with the purpose of the ESRB (to have an easy to access resource for those who needed it; parents mostly), it was not in keeping with the goals of game publishers.

In response to requests from publishers, who were likely getting rather miffed at having their game's revealed outside of their plans for such, the ESRB is now offering the ability for games to appear on their site at specified dates. Now, when a publisher submits a game for rating they can fill in a box for the date it will see upload to the main ESRB page. While it was noted that "the ESRB system will not work for consumers if publishers arbitrarily select dates bearing no reasonable relationship to consumer interest in the product," we doubt if there is going to any publisher who doesn't take advantage of the new system and hold back ratings till the latest date possible.

Oh well. Thankfully, we still have other countries ratings boards to leak our video game info for us.

Tags: early, esrb, game-ratings, leak

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Yuccadude @ Jun 20th 2008 1:47AM

Why should devs care about if people know about their game early. If they are the kind of gamer that cares about your game, you should be letting them know that you are hard at work on making them a game and they can start to get excited about it. If they don't care about your game, you aren't losing any money by them knowing about it sooner than you want them to.

Daniel @ Jun 20th 2008 1:53AM

Exactly, I would think it would be better for them to have that info out there earlier.

Seanross @ Jun 20th 2008 1:52AM

Lets see how well this works... But as I quickly found out this year. If people want to find something out, they will.

007craft @ Jun 20th 2008 2:25AM

This is dumb. I mean those developers are idiots to begin with for not announcing their games. an ESRB rating means the game is DONE. COMPLETE. FINISHED. READY FOR SALE. If your game is THAT far ahead into developement and it still hasnt even been announced, it must be a piece of crap to begin with.

I know theres exceptions like with secret XBLA ports coming for a surprise release, but for new games, yeah what I said above still stands.

Feedback @ Jun 20th 2008 3:57AM

Fair play to publishers, would be a bigger impact if the announcement about a game going gold was done rather via them than having people find out by the ESRB website...would have a better impact on the market I reckon...

pwkalt1 @ Jun 20th 2008 6:24AM

I don't really get why this is on 360 fanboy as opposed to joystiq. It seems like this is a change that would affect all platforms - not just the 360 in particular.

David W. @ Jun 20th 2008 8:30AM

? They're competitors, yes I know, same owner, but they're still competitors.

Plus stories overlap, I don't read Joystiq at all and rely on the individual sites, 360 fanboy, wii fanboy, for my news.

JayFight @ Jun 20th 2008 8:48AM

well if you think about it some developers might get and esrb and then make some tweeks or some such which could push there intended release date back as far as a year or more (as seen with some of the more recent trends) and they don't want people getting too much info too early because if you give someone all the info right away and then make them wait a really long time for it they will have lost interest for the most part (not true in all cases there are exeptions to that rule like metal gear solid 4) and so they want to wait till they're ready to let us know so that they can still hold our attention and build they hype to sell more copy's (one example of to much hype too early is timeshift from what i can tell too many people, me included, got tired of waiting for it and didn't buy it right away when it finally came out)

Jcarpio @ Jun 20th 2008 9:16AM

First of all let's make some clarifications.

It's the PUBLISHERS that have the problem with it, not the DEVELOPERS.

PUBLISHERS don't want it revealed early because they want the ability to announce and market the game. Haven't it leaked takes some of that announcement steam from them.

DEVELOPERS make the games and rely on the PUBLISHERS to market the games to be sold (as well as give them money to develop the games).

offday @ Jun 20th 2008 9:24AM

Meh. Oh well. We won't know about games as soon, but I don't know if I'd go as far as to call it an "end to an era."

Grant @ Jun 20th 2008 11:42AM

This is stupid.
If you want to keep your game all hush hush, don't submit it to the ESRB until you start the marketing for it. How hard is that?
Besides, most games that are announced long before this sort of leak don't need any sort of hype boost, while games that aren't, do need one. It was free press for developers, and apparently they are too concerned over total control of their product to see that.

Terrence Stasse @ Jun 20th 2008 11:46AM

As was pointed out above, it's the publishers, my friend, the publishers.

Grant @ Jun 20th 2008 11:49AM

alright, well my comment still works, just take out developers and plug in publishers.

"Besides, most games that are announced long before this sort of leak don't need any sort of hype boost, while games that aren't, do need one. It was free press for publishers, and apparently they are too concerned over total control of their product to see that."