South Korea pressures Apple to rate iPhone games

South Korean regulators are pressuring Apple to submit iPhone and iPod touch games for screening and approval by the country's Game Rating Board. According to The Korea Herald, South Korea does not allow distribution of game titles that have not earned the Game Rating Board's approval--however, Apple removed the Games category from the Korean version of its App Store in an apparent effort to skirt regulations, instead offering games via the Entertainment category. "We asked Apple to open its games category and get its games rated, but Apple shows no signs of doing so," a Game Rating Board official said. Thirty of the 100 most popular applications in the Korean App Store's Entertainment category are unauthorized games.

In a recent report to the U.S. Congress over violence in entertainment, the Federal Trade Commission identified concerns over the availability of age-inappropriate content in mobile games. In its sixth follow-up review of the motion picture, music and electronic game industries' practices on marketing violent entertainment to children, the FTC notes that most mobile games are not rated according to the standards established by the Entertainment Software Rating Board: "Given the sheer volume of game applications currently available for mobile devices and the dramatic rate at which applications are proliferating, in the near term, responsibility falls on wireless carriers and individual publishers to provide content information and effective parental controls," the report states.

The FTC study examined the Apple, Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint and Nokia websites to assess their respective efforts to rate advertised mobile game titles, and determined that all five websites offered games containing violent content, some of them mobile versions of home console titles tagged with the ESRB's M-for-mature rating. While none of the three U.S. operators offered rating information for their mobile games, the FTC reports that Apple assigns games age-based designations and content descriptors (e.g., "Frequent/Intense Realistic Violence"), while Nokia displayed the age-based rating and content icons used by the Pan European Game Information system.

For more on the Korean App Store controversy:
- read this Korea Herald article

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