[nubs]

Yes i dont doubt it, but as soon as the child uses their parents card to pay for the subscription, the parent has taken responsibility away from the retailer and the developer, so it still isnt a major concern to them.

What you said is aactually fairly silly as there are kids playing mature rated games and watching adult rated films all the time, so simply sticking "mature" on the box dosnt stop kids playing either. The MMOG credit card screening procedure is probably the most effective system to date for trying to stop kids playing games they shouldnt, its just that very few MMOGs have needed to show anything like realistic violence, nudity, drug taking, criminal activity or swearing in them, those that have get the high ratings... the only major one that i can think of was Neocron wich was a moderate success, but that was more down to it not being finished when it was released and generally poor reviews, not because less people could buy it.

Huxley isnt like other MMOGs, its a proper all action first person shooter, from the vids released it has blood in it wich may MMOGs do not, because they want to appeal to all ages and its not necassary to have realistic blood in those games. WoW is cartoony, EQ was trying to tap into every market it could, but Huxley is different, people will buy it because they want to play a game where they can login and either kill or destroy a couple of things, or they want to get involve dina huge battle where they kill/destroy a veyr large number of things.

They clearly arn't going to have nudity or swearing built into the game so it was never going to be a game that causes moral outrage like carmaggedon, GTA etc. so i very much doubt that the rating is important... and as i justified above, they have their own inbuilt disclaimer, you need to have access to a credit card so they are more or less blame free because if a child uses a credit card to sign up to the game, its the credit card holders responsibility as its 'their' subscription and account, they have to control who uses it.


Not that it makes any difference to me because game ratings are basically irrellevant in Europe as they all sign up to a voluntary code and an age recommendation, games that are really violent will ask for a "certificate" to cover their own arse, but games that dont cross any lines dont need to.

Ultimately they are launching the game to the tradditional FPS market so they would expect to get similar ratings as games like UT, Quake, FEAR, Doom3, halflife 2 and any successful FPS game have been violent and involve blood and gore, taking that out of the game to allow one non target area of the market to buy the game guilt free, will have the effect of making the game less attractive to the primary market that they are targetting.