The number M rated games had risen by 100% in the past few years.
Developers aren't that afraid that the more limited audience that an M rating restricts them too will significantly hurt sales. On paper it seems like a big loss, however in reality it is not. The market has spoken and developers have an ear on the vine. They know what's up.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if developers feel that an M rating will INCREASE sales, after all, underage gamers still play M rated games, I know I was playing them before I was old enough that I was technically supposed to play them. On the other hand, I'm sure there are some teenagers who see an M rated game and then want to play it when they might not have noticed it before because they think that it's "cool" to play violent video games.
It's also concieveable that the number of M rated games increasing could also not be because the actual content of the game has changed, but because it's shown in much more detail due to graphical improvements, and thus it's viewed as more serious, as I've seen things in older T rated games that would probably earn an M rating if portrayed in modern graphics. Of course, it could also have something to do with the fact that developers just realize that getting an M rating is really not bad for business at all too.
Yeah, supposedly things like burning corpses weren't in the original game they were shown (supposedly). Meant more along the lines because of a nudity mod made, the ESRB freaked out because modders were doing what they wanted (go figure, someone doing what they want and it's a problem :pinch:) and rechecked the game and boom, M rating. Not like it really mattered at that point plus that "scandal" might have actually sold more copies of Oblivion after that lol.
The thing to remember here is also that this wasn't just any nvde mod, the model used for it was actually already on the game disk, one just needed to use a mod to use it in the game, so in this case, the model was actually distributed with a nvde model on the disk, if the model used were custom made for the game, I doubt it would have affected anything, just as many other games get nvde mods yet you never hear about them being examined again by ESRB. I'd still say its an absurd reason for even considering rerating the game myself, since you still need to modify the game to use it, and only do so if you choose it, but at least it was still an asset created for the game by Bethesda, just one that really shouldn't warrant the attention of ESRB.
» Wed Mar 30, 2011 1:47 am 
