Today, the Entertainment Software Rating Board released its ratings classification breakdown for the year 2010. The organization, which is tasked with rating all titles published in the United States, reviewed and rated 1,638 games last year, with a mere 5 percent of them being rated ‘M’ for Mature. Unfortunately for the industry, M-rated titles are the ones that frequently cause controversy, like EA’s Bulletstorm or Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
The pie chart shows clear breakdowns based on rating, with a majority of games (55 percent) being rated ‘E’ for Everyone. The Teen rating follows with 21 percent of the titles, Everyone 10+ lands at 18 percent, and the little-used Early Childhood rating trails behind Mature with only 1 percent.
In contrast, BoxOfficeMojo shows that 169 of the 531 movies it tracked for 2010 – just over 31 percent – were rated R by the MPAA. 39 percent of the films were completely unrated, 18 percent were rated PG-13, 10 percent were PG, and only 1 percent were rated G, meaning they contained content for all ages. The numbers may not completely be accurate, with the MPAA citing 706 as the total number of films it rated in 2010, but a clear disparity is shown.
As an entertainment industry, will we ever reach the same mindset afforded to other forms of entertainment, including books and films?
[Via GameSpot]
