At this moment, any teaching or glamorisation of simulated gambling automatically leads to a PEGI 18 rating," the ratings board stated
Who’s the clown now?
The publishers own PEGI.
Whatever rating they want, they get.
Huuh?
The PEGI management board is people that publish games, people that make consoles and trade organisations.
None of whom want to see sales go down.
They’re behind the bonkers decision that representations of gambling are worse than actual gambling.
PEGI mainly exists to save publishers bothering with each country’s classifications boards. Before that you’d have like BBFC in the UK, and each country having to rate it. It’s industry self regulation, and like any good fox guarding the henhouse, they’re not doing a great job of it.
Awesome, I’m glad the dev held his position! He’s right that it’s incredibly moronic to have games like FIFA with actual gambling mechanics rated lower.
Balatro will get you hooked on lovely indie games, not gambling :)
While the win is good, the fact that it’s still a PEGI 12 game while FIFA is a PEGI 3 shows what an absolute joke the whole process is.
Australia had to deal with similar levels of bullshit for way too long before our ratings board finally capitulated to common sense and introduced an R18 rating (for games like The Last of Us, not even XXX content!).
We have an endemic gambling problem too, so I don’t foresee much common sense coming out of that mob anytime soon - either.
self censoring bodies like pegi are there to protect the industry, so it doesn’t get actual censorship from the government. EA is the industry. of course they get special treatment.
also gambling is the blueprint of AAA gaming now, so pegi loves it. they only do this shit to small devs so they can pretend to care while protecting industry giants from the actual scrutiny that they deserve.
Awesome to see them win this. If other games can have poker or other cards games where the characters are gambling and not have that influence their shit, the roguelike that uses playing cards in the same way Go-Fish does definitely shouldn’t be smacked over this.
Fuck EA and all the loot box game makers that don’t get hit with this crap
Balatro is a Poker Game in the same way that Gin and Bridge and 52 Pickup are Poker games.
it’s 7 card monti but with the gambling replaced with strategic decision making. the fact that lootboxes aren’t considered gambling, but removing gambling from poker is, it just puts on display how the big corporations are desperate to keep us locked into their entertainment machines and away from innovative art
