Comment Television rules (Score 4, Interesting) 190
In France, there are rules preventing 18+ games from being sown on TV before 22:30. Even channels broadcasting on cable, satellite and dsl networks must respect those rules. That poses a problem to channels like Nolife TV, specialized in video games, because a lot of games get a PEGI 18 rating - if the player is able to kill a human-looking enemy, and this is done in a somewhat realist context, it's PEGI 18. As a result, they must cram discussion of a lot of games in a small time slot.
The rule was originally designed for movies, by the way, but the French movie rating is much more relaxed than the games rating. For example, the last James Bond movie did not get any restriction at all, it would be PEGI 18 if it were a game. But the movie rating boards in Europe use different standards.
At then end; it looks like Nintendo took the most restrictive of those rules, and applied them to everyone, as if the WiiU was a TV channel. This will hurt them in more liberal markets. It does not help that Nintendo of Europe is headquartered in Germany, which has the most extreme restrictions on video games, and still requires a separate, different, ugly, enormous, unremovable logo on game packaging and game disks. And this is after the PEGI rating board mainly standardized on rules very close to the German ones...
The rule was originally designed for movies, by the way, but the French movie rating is much more relaxed than the games rating. For example, the last James Bond movie did not get any restriction at all, it would be PEGI 18 if it were a game. But the movie rating boards in Europe use different standards.
At then end; it looks like Nintendo took the most restrictive of those rules, and applied them to everyone, as if the WiiU was a TV channel. This will hurt them in more liberal markets. It does not help that Nintendo of Europe is headquartered in Germany, which has the most extreme restrictions on video games, and still requires a separate, different, ugly, enormous, unremovable logo on game packaging and game disks. And this is after the PEGI rating board mainly standardized on rules very close to the German ones...