Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

I stumbled across this article recently, and I thought some people might be interested to learn about what the ESRB is up to these days in their continuing efforts to crack down on renegade game developers. In the article they outline some of their new policies, but the one that really sticks out to me is their new hefty fines they have available to dish out to developers who don’t do things 100% by the books. Under new regulations, if a developer does not give accurate information about any new game’s content, they can be fined the simple lump sum of one million bones. The ESRB has a new slogan: Screw up, pay a million bucks. To some of your larger developers, a million dollars is pocket change, but to the smaller developers out there, that is a huge blow to the company checking account. It seems as though we will not be seeing any hot coffee content for a while, eh? Before you know it, Rockstar will creating award winning family game content. Perhaps in the future they will remake the original NES Bible Game for Xbox 360.

I think it’s great that we have a rating system for games. It is important that players know what they are buying content-wise. I just think that at some point there has to be a happy medium that doesn’t rub every game developer out there the wrong way. I think we should just let Hilary Clinton run the ESRB, that way there would be no more video games, period. That way I guess we would not have to worry about this issue at all. No Games, No problem! I hate to think like that about something that I know so many people enjoy so much. I am not writing this just to rant, I just want there to be a fair system for all of the people involved in the game process. I don’t care if you are a game developer, a congressman, or a 12 year old kid, I just want there be a reasonable system that works. That day may never come, and thats okay since I am over 17 years of age. Either way, this issue has always kind of irked me. Sometimes, too many rules can take the fun out of anything. What does everyone else think?