Hassknecht said:
Buxbaum666 said:
There's still violence but you can't use human shields and people don't drop money when you kill them. The cops will come after you the moment you kill a civilian. And the "Whored Mode" was removed, it seems.
I don't get why publishers region lock their games like this. It's not illegal for adults to aquire and play uncut games yet they decide to keep all Germans from activating a non-German key on Steam.
Convenience. For the german market they'd have to enforce a stricter age-restriction if they wanted to sell indexed games to us. That's hard to implement, so they just don't sell the uncut versions at all.
how so? YOu mean they just dont bother to implement it.
Age verifications for games like Saints Row 3 and the rest works like always. There are ways how to do it. And I think that a system like Steam which is so large cant find a way how to do it, is rather ridiculous.
Tagaziel said:
It's because the German state has a special commission to decide what is harmful to young people. Which is funny: in a country so obsessed with personal freedoms and fighting fascism, nobody seems to have a real problem with the existence of an institution that encourages (or rather, forces) censorship.
thats not completely true. There is in fact no kind of cencor ship. Not more then what you have with the US for example.
Yes, there is a place where they test games. (
for example the USK)
But it is as far as I am aware NOT required to send your games to any kind of test. Thing is if you dont do it, you have to deal with certain restrictions. Like no advertising where minors could see it, no public display like in a super market, it is still allowed to sell the products legaly.
No one is forced to cencor anything here. And before someone comes up with some example about how harsh the laws are. Then look at how many times certain games change their content so they can sell it at wall mart for example. Many companies for example want their products to be rated either M or Teen.
In Germany we have a similar situation. Games can be very violent, but they have to accept high ratings then as we have something that is equal to Adults only. - THe issue with steam is simply that they dont have a very good system to verify the age of their users, and thus they simply avoid the situation completely by not offering the games. But there are ways how to sell them without making any changes to the content of the game.
I am not saying it is a perfect system. But again as far as I know no one is forced to "change" his games really.
Of course there are topics which will in general cause a lot of trouble, maybe even leading to preasure, like killing civilians as terrorits, or anything that has something to do with nazis, like killing jews, playing a Nazi etc. those kind of situations always cause a controversy. But Germany is by far not the only place where this hapens.
). The first one equals USK18 in that you can still publicly sell and advertise unless it gets "indexed" later, the latter means no advertising but the publisher can't be legally pursued if the medium should get seized by law.
