Take-Two Settles With FTC

Let me get this straight so I understand.

Going around smashing people with cars, beating them to death, shooting them in the face point blank, vulgar vocabulary, etc. etc. for endless hours is a Teen rating, you know, cause that's what you want your teen to do to enjoy themselves, but a mini game that last's a whole 2 minutes of doing something we as humans were intended to do makes it a Mature rating which also causes an 11k fine?

Preposterous! Sounds more like an excuse to steal a piece of someone else's pie!

They got lucky on this one. With all the freaking Congress people breathing down the industry's neck in regards to "violence and sexual undertones" and outright calls for banning violent games, I'd have thought Take 2 was gonna get rear-ended on this one.

They intentionally decieved customers by neglecting to remove content that wasn't accessible to them without downloading a third party piece of software anyway?

They make it sound like some kind of secret level, just use the Konami code and we'll give you a sex game! I can't believe that it's gone this far without someone explaining how the hell this stuff actually works.

People on the shack just don't seem to get why what they did was bad. Lets makeup a pretend situation real quick.

Battlefield 2 is a T rated game. It recieved this rating by removing all blood from the game. This makes many gamers sad, as we are sadistic and enjoy lots of blood because it looks neat. Now let's say that the game initially had blood, lots and lots of blood. But only when EA decided to go for that T rating the blood was "removed". So the code and art assets were locked up and hidden in a corner. It was kept of course because EA could always change their mind and go back to M. If it were left on the CD then, through the use of a 3rd party tool, it could be unlocked and then you'd get blood, hurray!

The reason Take-Two got off light (24.5 million light) is because it was an accident. The code was obviously unfinished and not meant to be seen. The problem is what if it wasn't an accident? What if EA 'locked' the blood code out, but with the direct intention of it being unlocked eventually. Well now EA has cheated the system. They released their M rated game but with that T rating to get extra sales.

And thats the problem, that companies could deliberately leave code on a CD with the intent of having it unlocks to cheat the ratings system. How would you know whats intentional and what was left on by mistake or perhaps just lazyness? A precident had to be set to prevent abuse in the future from other companies.

Read the ESRB <a href = "http://www.esrb.org/ratings/faq.jsp">FAQs</a>, and you may start to wonder why the FTC even gets a say in this. "As the game industry’s self-regulatory body, ESRB is responsible for the enforcement of its rating system." So while Take 2 may have been in violation of their VOLUNTARY agreement with the ESRB, they did not violate any federal law or regulation (the ESRB not being part of the FTC), so why in the world would they be subject to penalties under federal law or regulation? It's good that the FTC did not find them, but the wording of this sets a dangerous precedent.

11k is nothing to them

after playing God Of War i feel like this is a fucking joke

My favorite part of this whole fiasco was when Take Two claimed the Hot Coffee mod actually hacked the content into the game as opposed to simply unlocking it. LOL! Yah, right.

Believe it or not, I would've rather had Congress try to pass a law. Why? So it would go to the Supreme Court and all the idiots would get a nice, hot cup of Shut The Fuck Up.