At this moment, any teaching or glamorisation of simulated gambling automatically leads to a PEGI 18 rating," the ratings board stated
Who's the clown now?
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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Balatro is a Poker Game in the same way that Gin and Bridge and 52 Pickup are Poker games.
it's 7 card monti but with the gambling replaced with strategic decision making. the fact that lootboxes aren't considered gambling, but removing gambling from poker is, it just puts on display how the big corporations are desperate to keep us locked into their entertainment machines and away from innovative art
I think it's more that hysterical moral guardians and corporate boobs only see the traditionally casino-like superficial imagery of cards, dice, spades, clubs, slots, etc. and instantly knee-jerk themselves into declaring it "immoral" without actually bothering to take the twelve seconds required to experience the gameplay. At which point they would immediately realize that they are wrong.
This is Kyle's Mom's version of only reading the headline, or not bothering to look beyond the dust jacket and only screeching about imaginary content that exists only inside their own assumptions and based purely on the picture on the cover.
It can be both. The moral screeching is a convenient cover story for the corrupt industry.
Nonono you don't understand, lootboxes make us money! Thats not gambling.
Playing cards though? Oh that's definitely gambling. Go fish? Gambling. Solitaire? Definitely gambling. 52 pick-up? Straight to gambling.
Kyle's Mom
Who now?
Have you ever met my friend Kyle's mom?
She's the biggest bitch in the whole wide world
Edit: It references the south park movie where Kyle's mom creates aa moral panic about the children watching a R-rated movie containing swear words.
Precisely that.
I will add that Sheila Broflovski (a.k.a. Kyle's Mom) through her sheer incessant nagging (and also blame shifting away from herself and the other parents as spelled out in "Blame Canada") misses the mark so far that she manages to incite a hot war with Canada that gets enough people killed to spill sufficient blood to fulfill an ancient evil prophecy that literally incarnates both Satan himself and Saddam Hussein's revenant form back onto the face of the Earth.
Note that this not only predated Saddam's actual real world death, but Matt and Trey also successfully predicted the eruption of the Karen trend, probably a good decade or so before it'd risen to the height -- or sunk to the depths -- it's achieved today. Although senseless moral panics were well known and quite popular in the '80's and '90's already, to the extent that they not only managed to accurately predict the response to their own movie, but also parody it within the same movie.
Speaking of only reading the headline, I love me some corporate boobs.
No HR don't allow enjoyment of corporate boobs. They kick you out at the office for that kind of thing.
Unless you are the manager your obviously, oh ironically you work in the games industry.
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While the win is good, the fact that it’s still a PEGI 12 game while FIFA is a PEGI 3 shows what an absolute joke the whole process is.
Australia had to deal with similar levels of bullshit for way too long before our ratings board finally capitulated to common sense and introduced an R18 rating (for games like The Last of Us, not even XXX content!).
We have an endemic gambling problem too, so I don’t foresee much common sense coming out of that mob anytime soon - either.
self censoring bodies like pegi are there to protect the industry, so it doesn't get actual censorship from the government. EA is the industry. of course they get special treatment.
also gambling is the blueprint of AAA gaming now, so pegi loves it. they only do this shit to small devs so they can pretend to care while protecting industry giants from the actual scrutiny that they deserve.
Very true, same applies to the ESRB in the US. The ESA literally only formed the organisation to self-censor rather than leave it to the Gov’t following outrage over Mortal Kombat — if I’m remembering correctly?
Here in Australia, the ACB is a government body — but just about as useless, if not even more so! For the longest time, we had to have our games additionally censored because they were viewed as for children and therefore couldn’t depict excessive violence, any sexual themes or drug use. Manhunt, Grand Theft Auto 3 & Vice City were notable examples.
What am I getting at, even I don’t know. I guess to say that both implementations can be shit..? 🤷🏻♂️
FC25 is rated 12+ in germany, same as Balatro.
Pegi seems out of touch.
It's that idiotic classification system that's the problem. A game is considered to be gambling game if it involves cards.
Awesome, I'm glad the dev held his position! He's right that it's incredibly moronic to have games like FIFA with actual gambling mechanics rated lower.
Balatro will get you hooked on lovely indie games, not gambling :)
They tried to claim it taught you how to gamble. Seriously that was their argument.
So clearly they didn't play the game because if you actually turned up to a casino and tried to play like that they kick you out.
Awesome to see them win this. If other games can have poker or other cards games where the characters are gambling and not have that influence their shit, the roguelike that uses playing cards in the same way Go-Fish does definitely shouldn't be smacked over this.
Fuck EA and all the loot box game makers that don't get hit with this crap
If other games can have poker or other cards games where the characters are gambling and not have that influence their shit
I doubt it though because the game doesn't have any gambling in it at all. It just uses the imagery of poker, that's it. I have no more of an idea how to play poker now than they did before spending 900 Brazilian hours on the game.
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Just cut a few murder scenes and all the blood out and it should be fine 😉😉😉
Definitely thought from the thumbnail that it was PEGI 13 -> PEGI 12.
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