With all the issues surrounding new patents and shady business practices, there wasn’t much more that could drag the gaming industry through the mud. Well, it appears that the ESRB is joining in on the fight for who could make the most amount of mud for the industry by taking a fight that didn’t need to exist with the Indie community. This has nothing to do with stricter rules regarding the content in games, this has everything to do with making it a little harder for Indie game studios to release physical copies of a game.
The ESRB is now making Indie developers pay $3,000 for a rating license for their games. now this is actually down from $10,000 however, Indie developers that released a digital version of their game were able to apply for a free rating and then could release a physical copy of their game later using the same license. This is now apparently going to change as the ESRB now wants to have all Indie developers purchase this $3,000 rating license if they are going to release a physical copy of their game to market which for some studios is the only way they can make some additional money (minus the cost to produce the discs and cases) and coupled with this new charge, will make any chance of a profit non-existent.
There is no silver lining to this issue as there are no governing bodies that keep the ESRB in check but with the issues that are plaguing the big 3 publishers with pushing for more and more micro-transactions, we need to bring awareness to this issue and help the Indie developers from having to chose between creativity or publishing physical copies. However, if the ESRB keeps the free license for digital only, we need to have Sony, Steam & Microsoft give more money to them to help keep the creativity flowing.
