The ESRB has been making a spectacle of itself in recent months. Aside from the usual rating controversies, they have accidentally been spoiling the announcement of a bunch of games by posting ESRB ratings for games that are still in development. It’s all come to a frustrated head as of yesterday as the ESRB site, despite promising to stop doing this, managed to spoil three unannounced titles to be published by Atlus.
As a result, Atlus got pissed and posted a press release titled as follows:
ATLUS TO MAKE ALL FUTURE GAME ANNOUNCEMENTS THROUGH ESRB WEBSITE
As taken from the news story at Kotaku and the press release itself, here’s an excerpt:
“Our experiment has been a rousing success,” said Aram Jabbari, Manager of PR and Sales, beaming. “Allowing information about our upcoming titles to be silently posted on ESRB’s website has been a triumph, and we’ve decided to abandon all direct, overt disclosures of our future games in favor of quietly allowing the posting of new titles onto ESRB.org.
I’m heavily inclined to agree with their complaints as the ESRB has spoiled the marketing movements of various games, including Mega Man 9. Countless man hours go into announcing and promoting these games and it’s very disrespectful that the ratings board has yet to correct this fatal flaw. I hope that they fix this soon, because it’s really not fair to keep doing this to companies, especially since they almost have no choice but to submit to the ESRB for review.