NFTs, loot boxes, bad language… Changes are coming to PEGI’s age rating system | Pocket Gamer.biz

“PEGI has become one of those things that’s really widely recognised among the industry and consumers, but what’s changed over the years?”

Plenty of insightful PGC London conversations have been taking place today, and Video Games Industry Memo editor George Osborn set this key question in one such conversation with Games Rating Authority director general Ian Rice, who proceeded to share his experience with age ratings.

PEGI’s age rating system has been around for over two decades now, and in its journey to becoming one of the most recognised age rating systems anywhere in the world, it’s evolved plenty. Changes have been made to how games are rated based on evolving tech and user feedback, and looks set for further changes ahead in the increasingly regulated online world.

Age appropriate

Rice began with discussing age ratings of physical games, much more prevalent when PEGI ratings began in 2003. He noted how age ratings had to be laid out clearly from the start with developers sending “pertinent” footage of their games in relation to any violence, sex, bad language and more, which PEGI could determine a rating from. However, if the game later turns out to have more extreme content than shown by developers, boxed games’ ratings as printed on a box can’t be changed after the fact, and so they would have to be recalled from shop shelves.

Of course, physical games do still exist, and Rice reiterated that “that rating has to be spot on”.

“There’s very little contextual sway in the ratings. We try to keep the process as black and white as possible,” he added. For example, “moderate violence” without blood falls into a different category to cartoony violence like in Mario, which falls into a different category to violence in Call of Duty, and so on.

And on the topic of Call of Duty, loot boxes worked their way into the conversation; Rice discussed the “danger” of factoring loot boxes into age rating classifications as this would land games like Call of Duty and FIFA into the same age banding. “We didn’t want to have that as an influential factor into the rating,” he explained.

NFTs, meanwhile, “may end up with a higher age rating” as part of a “precautionary” approach, since play-to-earn models can “make out to the player that they’re viable ways of making money”.

The future also looks to hold “more nuance” with new descriptors on games, like “bad language” being distinct from “discrimination”. And an increasing number of mobile apps are getting age ratings now too, though Rice mentioned that this is predominantly on the most popular apps, as there simply isn’t the manpower to give an accurate age rating to every mobile game with “fewer downloads”.

There’s a lot more still to discover from PGC London 2024, with talks and conversations ongoing through January 22 and 23, from the biggest and best the games industry has to offer.

There’s a lot more still to discover from PGC London 2024, with talks and conversations ongoing through January 22 and 23. Find out more about what’s on and how you can be part of it here.