Indonesia Law Backfires Insanely

This is something that has been a mix of weird, bad, and absolutely hilarious for all the wrong reasons. So Indonesia recently passed a law that requires all games to go through a rating system. Sort of like the USA’s ESRB or Europe’s PEGI rating. They decided to adopt a version of PEGI which means rather than a letter system like ESRB’s E for Everyone or M for Mature, they chose the age range 3+ is the lowest to 18+ as the highest. Unfortunately, rather than manually grade the games based on content they may have just asked an AI or worse took one look at titles or cover art. This means more family friendly games with no violence like Story Of Seasons were slapped with a 18+ and games targeted towards adults were given 3+. Now depending on where you live this can mean a game was completely unavailable to you. In several countries they won’t put up games of a certain rating. In the US this is equivalent to something rated AO an older possibly retired rating simply due to people no longer holding that kind of game. I would assume any rating above 18+ would not be held so wouldn’t even be put up on the storefront. They claimed this was to protect kids, but how are people going to protect kids if the system put in place to do that harms them because from this situation alone many games rated for their violence and themes were recommended to 3 year olds.

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