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.
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.
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
I think it’s more that hysterical moral guardians and corporate boobs only see the traditionally casino-like superficial imagery of cards, dice, spades, clubs, slots, etc. and instantly knee-jerk themselves into declaring it “immoral” without actually bothering to take the twelve seconds required to experience the gameplay. At which point they would immediately realize that they are wrong.
This is Kyle’s Mom’s version of only reading the headline, or not bothering to look beyond the dust jacket and only screeching about imaginary content that exists only inside their own assumptions and based purely on the picture on the cover.
It can be both. The moral screeching is a convenient cover story for the corrupt industry.
