![]() All games with an asterisk (*) were appealed and later allowed to release with no changes whereas any game with a caret (^) was censored and later re-released. For this reason there have been a decent number of banned games, as you can see in the list below. If a title is banned in Australia and is found by customs to be attempting to enter the country, the penalty to the recipient is up to $110,000 Australian. Since the introduction of the R18+ rating in video games, publishers can now pay to have any banned title reclassified if they so desire. As a result, if you couldn’t get an R15+ rating, you were essentially banned. Up until recently the R18+ rating, an equivalent to “R” or “M” in this country, was allowed to be classified for movies but video games were not a valid medium for the rating. In some other countries, you’re given a stringent refusal to release your product after you’ve created it.Įasily the most referenced source of banned video games because of the Australian Classification Board (ACB), a governmental group, that reviews and rates media. Currently the major console manufacturers refuse to release AO titles, but that doesn’t restrict a developer from releasing on PC or an available platform. The difference between this situation and the situation in other countries is that the industry self polices and decides what is allowed and what is not. As a result, developer Rockstar released a “toned down” version that was approved with an M rating and saw retail release. This isn’t to say content isn’t stripped down, many of us remember Manhunt 2 getting an AO rating that rendered it unable to release on its intended platforms (PS2 and Wii). It’s one of those great freedoms that we take completely for granted in this country – we don’t have our media banned or censored federally. Aside from Rapelay, a game I can barely give credit as a video game and was never intended to see a release anyway, I’ve never heard of a game that isn’t welcome in the US. Have you ever eagerly anticipated the release of a game only to find out it isn’t coming to the United States? Imagine if the reasoning wasn’t due to licensing issues or internal policies by the ESRB and console developers.
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