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2mo ago

PEGI gives Balatro an 18+ rating for gambling imagery

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2mo ago

❗Top Gaming (General) posts of the month❗ (21 Dec 2024)

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Balatro @lemm.ee

Lurker @sh.itjust.works

2mo ago

PEGI gives Balatro an 18+ rating for gambling imagery

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Gamedev @lemmy.world

Jeffool @lemmy.world

2mo ago

PEGI gives Balatro an 18+ rating for gambling imagery, Balatro developer responds

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189 comments

this is starting to be horseshit. Every windows computer has a version of fucking solitare on it , there are other card based games that don't get this treatment, and the lootboxes are actual gambling.
I thought at the start it was a type of beurocratical problem, but it's been too long.
- Not entirely sure about the European PEGI, but the American ESRB is funded by the same companies that it regulates. It was created after the outcry about violent games and was the industry self-regulating to avoid the government getting more involved.
  It is a lobby group for the industry, for better and in this case very much for worse.
  I assume PEGI is little different.
  
  PEGI and many other groups are private groups. They're not an authority of any form. They're not associated with government, public regulation, or public election. They're a group of people that create their own standards outside of the ISO or any actual regulation representing the public.
  Some countries do have actual public systems, but many just have these private groups that know best.
  
  To clarify: the ESRB is the rating arm. The ESA that runs it? That's the lobbying arm.
  
  In fairness, I would much rather that than governments directly controlling access, creating an additional form of direct censorship.
  Not saying what we have now is great or anything though. I'm not exactly defending it.
- did you just compare solitaire to gambling?
  
  It's as much related to gambling as Balatro is.
  
  That would be the point, yes. Balatro has cards and chips, but chips are just there for keeping points. If Balatro is 18+ for gambling imagery, then so should Solitaire. That would be stupid, so Balatro shouldn't get it, either.

They haven’t understood the game at all, I wonder if they even looked at it for more than two minutes
Run game > see playing cards and poker chips > close > PEGI 18
- They're not looking into blatant gambling in AAA titles, of course they won't take a closer look into an indie game. They're completely useless.
- Ah, but there are also tarot cards, which is spooky Occult voodoo magic. Balatro backwards might spell "Satan is Lord" in some ancient druidic script.
  
  Praise Otralab!
- It can't be that easy. PEGI says that games containing gambling (real money or not) are rated with PEGI 12 to 18. So there must be something else to the game that led to this rating.
  
  or...you know... they're just morons.
  
  Maybe winning a game award while being solo developer studio, it feels like this to me

He probably forgot to funnel millions of dollars to non-profits and businesses adjacent to PEGI decisionmakers and their family members. Rookie mistake.

Windows comes bundled with solitaire. How is it allowed in schools?
- I think the current microsoft version of solitaire has microtransactions and ads so is actually significantly worse
  
  They added micro transactions and ads to fucking solitaire? How have I not heard about this till now...
  
  Why, how, the fuck do you add microtransactions to fucking solitaire?!
  
  You're being funny, right? Tell me you're just kidding
  
  I also don't think it comes pre-installed anymore, you have to get it through Microsoft's meme store that no one uses.
  
  MTX and ads? Then it's clearly only 3+ and should be allowed lol
- Give the kids Linux! Build a generation of superusers!
  
  Supertux depicts imagery of speeding, misdemeanor and felony. +18 Age rating for Torvalds and all of his derivatives.
- Because you don't place bets on your solitaire hand.
  
  Maybe look into the game being discussed even a little before commenting on it.

Fuck PEGI, their ratings always sucked and weren't useful at all. Full blown swearing? 13+. One cigar through 500 hours of gameplay? Adults only. Never cared, never will.
- Violence and gore? 13+. Some boobs? Adults only.
  Killing good, love bad.
  
  If anybody knows about love it's rimjob_rainer.
  
  And people pretend that only American ratings systems pull this kind of bullshit.

I wish lawmakers had some balls on this subject. If there's gambling, they should have to register as a gambling company and comply with all the other restrictions on gambling advertisements in each jurisdiction.
- The problem here is that Baltaro does not have gambling. It just uses cards and chips as the basis for playing the game. Like Magic the Gathering or Inscryption.
  
  Using chips is even a stretch honestly. There are some chip imagery here and there but otherwise 'chips' are just how points are called.
  
  Is there betting (such as buy-in / ante) in Balatro?
  Is there in MtG?
  
  They also base it on poker, yeah cards can transform each other but it's still quite literally a poker game. This isn't MTG. (Which is just real life loot boxes)

Hngh. Balatro already had a bunch of hassle on Switch eShop due to the PEGI ratings change.
Earlier, Nintendo somehow got a PEGI 12 rating for 51 Worldwide Games, which includes poker and blackjack. I wonder what they argued to avoid the 18 rating. "Sure, this compilation has poker and blackjack, but it's not like we made it fun." (It's adequate but compared to Balatro it's very much a non-frills experience.)
- "sure our game has gambling elements, but we're Nintendo so shut the fuck up and give us a better rating because you're a private company in the business of giving ratings"
- I believe 51 Games came out right before the stricter PEGI policy. Same year at least. The whole thing is very silly.

Balatro is a hard drug worse than heroin. We need to protect our kids from the bottomless pit of roguelite games
- Thank God it's ten dollars.
  I almost downloaded it.
  
  If you've ever spent money on a movie theatre ticket, you value your time at $7-$20 dollars an hour. This... is thousands of hours of entertainment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46MQ1ZMZ-l4
3 and older game.
- Gotta love how they saved the literal slot machine for a minute in to the video so it wouldn't be too obvious.
- Just right up front with the card pack gambling mechanic.

Why is he still using Twitter? Does he want a bunch of Nazis replying to him?
- Because, unfortunately, millions of people still use it. If you're selling a product, it's in your best interest to have as much social media presence as possible.
  Also, it's better to have an official presence on those platforms so others can't impersonate you as easily.
  
  Then there should also be a version of the post on Mastodon, and this post should be a screenshot of that one.
- Twitter is by far the larger platform, and small independent creators have to work to promote their game on every platform they can, if they want to succeed. The moral high ground of not using undesirable social media sites is nice, but isn't fair to people who are partially dependent on those platforms to make a living.
  
  Also, the simple fact is that there is no reason that any entity promoting their product has to choose any of these platforms over the other--you can just post to all of them, every single one that has enough users to be worth posting to.
  
  I've seen several small creators say they get 10 times the engagement on Bluesky. That includes sales through promo links, which can't be faked. It's becoming clear that X's numbers are mostly illusory at this point.
- Twitter can reach various community from variety of region, like English Asia Twitter.
  Entire fediverse is still mostly Western community.

let's just do like all parents buying the last Call of Duty to their 10-year-old and just don't give a fuck about PEGI.
- The thing is, this is likely going to affect their sales to some degree.
  As a parent, you may have age lock on your child's account, or search games by rating, or just not know what this game is when asked to buy it but judging by rating.
  I don't know how significant of an impact that is, but it's unfair.
  
  I think they've done them a favour in a way. If this was day one then it might hurt them but they're past the point of like 90% of their sales I bet, and now pegi looking like incompetent dinosaurs is just a free second wave of social media exposure

Reminds me of that Australian law that was proposed to make anything with a relation to casino games Restricted 18 but merely mature for exploitative slot machine loot box mechanics.
- I haven't seen Loot Boxes in a game in awhile, I kinda prefer those to FOMO...
  I think the perfect system is you earn Loot Boxes by playing that can contain anything, but you can buy the specific things you want at any time, the boxes themselves are unlocked through gameplay.
  Heroes of the Storm did this, and god I miss that game.
  I wish DBD did it
  
  HOTS 2.0 did so much good, man. It's a shame the game's basically dead. Was a lot of fun to play with my brother
  I realised that what brought me back to League was Wild Rift. Maybe of HOTS had a "mobile" adaptation, I'd come back. Just not much (if at all) a PC gamer nowadays
  
  Any form of taking money inside a video game is the same abuse. Lootboxes per-se only disappeared once people admitted they were barely-disguised gambling. All that changed is the disguise.
  And everyone scoffing 'no no no, lootboxes were different, whatever's happening now is fiiine' have the same damn arguments as people who told me lootboxes were 'fiiine' twenty goddang years ago.
- Sounds about right. I'd seen "slot machines" (we call em poker machines or "the pokies") more times than I can remember before I was 18.
  
  "the pokies"
  You ever Google that?

Might as well go all in on that new rating.
Balatro 1.5 Patch Notes.
All the Jokers now hang dong.
Big naturals Queens are worth double.

Are all game rating systems just complete and utter garbage? Dare you to find a good one.
- The ESRB isn’t awful, it’s not perfect of course, but I think it’s pretty dang good for what it is.
  
  I mean the point of all rating systems in the US was fear of government regulation of content and having to fight that particular legal battle. It basically exists because moral busybodies were upset about Night Trap, Mortal Kombat and Doom.
- Critiquing Doge on steam

NBA 2K literally had slot machine in it. System is corrupt.

I'm hopelessly addicted to gatcha. When I saw this I bought Balatro.

When I was young I always wondered why the nhl games had a 16+ rating and Fifa had 3+. Figured both of them where ordinary sports.
Apparently fighting automatically shoots that nhl rating to the same level as GTA and balantro.

Wait, wasn't this already an issue a while back and wasn't that resolved?
- It was banned by a few countries for looking like a gambling game which was a separate thing, now it's just rated as an adult game by PEGI.
  
  Right - I was thinking of the brief store pull.
  But I thought that got resolved with the game getting the 18+ PEGI rating back in March already?
  https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2024/03/balatro-back-on-switch-eshop-in-europe-with-new-age-rating
  Or was it like a provisional rating?

It's a puzzle game. You're not even playing cards against somebody.

Steer clear of clowns emojis, bub.

I would give proprietary software 18+ rating too, nobody know what's inside.

Why should we care what a talking horse pseudo-plinco game thinks should be the age rating of their competitors?
- Wut? Pan European Game Information (PEGI) is the European equivalent of ESRB. Their ratings matter because they have an obvious bias against indies, which hurts their sales.
  
  I was jokingly referring to PEGGLE
- That’s the fun part, you don’t have to care. The first and only step is to just keep scrolling—better luck next time.
- It’s a good question

I still wonder why the hell is this game classified as a roguelike? It's poker mixed with MTG. Also, why are you crying dude? You made a literal slot machine.
- It has rouge features of building up a lot of utility in each run
  
  No, rouge is the stuff that ladies put on their cheeks. You mean rogue, as in wildcard, untameable, privateer.
  
  Semi-permanency is not a defining feature of roguelikes, in most of them every run starts from scratch.

I'm happy to lobby for the balatro dev once he posts on a federated media (real fed, not bluesky).
Personally, I don't care if balatro is popular here, the pegi 18 rating will impact sales 0%. Also, FC24s gambling should be banned EU wide or the rating of the game should be upped to 18+. Better yet, we should use this Balatro slip up from PEGI to get FC24s rating to be revised to 18+
- Personally, I don’t care if balatro is popular here, the pegi 18 rating will impact sales 0%.
  I don't doubt that some weird ultra religious family will ban Balatro in their house because of that.

Loot boxes suck but the only thing separating this game from gambling is the use of real money. It's literally a poker game.
This is the Steam Store description -
Combine valid poker hands with unique Joker cards in order to create varied synergies and builds. Earn enough chips to beat devious blinds, all while uncovering hidden bonus hands and decks as you progress. You’re going to need every edge you can get in order to reach the boss blind, beat the final ante and secure victory.
Yeah they were always going to get PEGI 18. This moaning is just a way to sell their game.
- In Balatro, the Ante is the boss's health and chips are the amount of damage done to a boss. The poker hands are just attacks done to the boss's health. They use poker terms because it's inspired by card games, not because there's gambling.
  
  The only gambling in this game is picking the goddamn wheel card even though I know it's going to give me "nope!"
  
  I didn't say there was and neither did PEGI. The issue is all the terminology and visuals are gambling related. This is like giving a cigarette smoker a nicotine vape and saying it's not cigarettes. It's technically true but you'd be insane to authorize it for kids.
- Yahtzee uses "valid poker hands" and dice for scoring too. They sell that in toy stores.
  
  Yatzhee is dice. It uses combinations of numbers. They turn into points. Before you make any other ridiculous comparisons the idea is to perform to standard. Not to lower the standard. Gambling is a serious addiction and making games about it is a serious issue.
- So then explain why games with actual real money gambling aren't rated 18+, is gambling "imagery" with no gambling really that much worse than having actual gambling?
  
  Ask PEGI why loot boxes aren't rated 18+, I'm not defending them.
- These games not only have poker in the name, they are literally casino sims, and you play against other players:
  https://store.steampowered.com/app/384180/Prominence_Poker/
  https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP2070-CUSA01104_00-UPUREPOKER000001/
  Both pegi 12. Your argument is flawed.
  
  Two wrongs don't make a right.
- It's literally not.
- Balatro doesn't have anything like gambling. There's no betting. You don't even have an opponent. The chips are only points, and the goal is to get as high a score as you can. The rules vary wildly from poker in ways that could never work with multiple players, let alone with real cards. It just looks like poker at the start and that description helps give you an initial idea of how to play.

189 comments