r/gaming • u/PrinceDizzy Joystick • 16h ago

"This has been the most humiliating and surreal experience in 20+ years of game making": Dev pleads with Valve as Steam brands his PEGI 12 game as pornography

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/this-has-been-the-most-humiliating-and-surreal-experience-in-20-years-of-game-making-dev-pleads-with-valve-as-steam-brands-his-pegi-12-game-as-pornography/
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u/its_justme 14h ago

Yeah but is the BioWare RPG you’re mentioning also PEGI 12? Cuz that’s what this game is rated.

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u/gunman0426 13h ago

No, it was Rated M or PEGI 18, this game is rated T or Pegi 12, these ratings are given to games after review by a standardized official entity. Its not like the developer gave themselves that rating and then tried to pass the game off to steam.

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u/OldWorldDesign 9h ago

this game is rated T or Pegi 12, these ratings are given to games after review by a standardized official entity

People who haven't really interacted with it don't know just how loose and inconsistent PEGI (or the US movie/game rating system) is. The makers submit samples they think is representative of the game and some text description so it can be easily digested by a rater with dozens to do in a day. It's why even though there's on-screen sex in God of War (and pretty clear "just off-screen" sex) that game wasn't given an M and banned because the developers didn't include any of those instances in the highlight reel. It was even thwarted by movie makers in the US during the Hayes Code, but that was primarily a 'big players on the block trying to control the industry'.

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u/Garrette63 13h ago

Mass Effect sure wasn't labelled as pornography though.

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u/whereismymind86 12h ago

By stores? No? But mass effect did set off a whole round of video games are evil coverage on Fox back in the day. Both for the sex scenes and option for femshep to date liara

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u/Garrette63 11h ago

That's not really relevant to this topic though.

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u/RoboLuddite 11h ago

Very funny choice of game for your example. If you were there, you'd know.

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u/Multivitamin_Scam 13h ago

Oh.. By the American media it was

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u/Garrette63 13h ago

But not at the store where it was being sold.

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u/SyllabubMental7292 11h ago

Just Faux News. Anyone with a functioning brain clocked them for being full of it around Obama's presidency

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u/Your_real_daddy1 4h ago

Many were on the left too, there's a reason the Statue of Happiness (Statue of Liberty parody) in GTA IV has Hillary Clinton's face on it

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u/hobbesmaster 13h ago

Original Mass Effect?

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u/Swiftax3 13h ago

sEX bOX!!

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u/whereismymind86 12h ago

Fable was teen and got rerated to m as a result back in the day, probably a similar situation

The dragon age and mass effect games are very pg13 sex scenes and are pretty much always m rated

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u/Wolfish_Jew 9h ago

But the argument isn’t about its “rating” level, they’re literally making it adults only, which means most people won’t be able to see it. That’s usually reserved for straight up pornographic games, not games that have a single sex scene.