When the classification board (a part of The Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) body) made a statement last year about seeking to rate and classify DLC content such as iPhone applications (in the same way all console and PC games are required in Australia), it was met with bewilderment and harsh criticism amongst many Australian iPhone and game enthusiasts nationwide. Such a move would seem highly impractical (the current number of apps in the appstore total more than 150,000) and entirely unnecessary, considering Apple's own reviewing system that weeds out inappropriate and offensive apps.
But imagine if the classification board was given the green light to classify every single iPhone game and application out there, each game requiring their standard reviewing process and a review fee of $1150 or $2040 before it can be released in the Australian market. What could the resulting effect be? Well, two things are sure to happen.
1. As explained earlier, the large number of apps released means that it's entirely impractical to review all new titles in a reasonable time. Games will meet inevitable delays, likely many months, before they get approved for release.
2. The review fee of $1150 or $2040 assures that many developers will find it extremely difficult to justify the cost of submitting their small DLC game (costing between $3 to $15 per pop) for review, and therefore many titles will not even make it to the appstore.
Such a scenario would prove disastrous for the appstore market in Australia, for developers as well as owners of iPhones, iPods, and iPads.
The shocking news, however, is that this same exact scenario has been taking place on the Nintendo WiiWare and DSiWare DLC service. All developers (local and abroad) are required to submit their games to the Australian classification board, and are charged the same fee for reviews as disc based games. The result, as predicted above, has meant that many games are either not available in the Australian WiiWare and DSiWare marketplace, or they are arriving much, much later due to the review process.
Not surprisingly, this situation has seriously irked Sydney developer, Nnooo. Nnooo are developers of Pop, the first Western game announced for the WiiWare service. While a new proposal for a reduced review fee to $550 is welcomed, Nnooo are making a call for an appropriate DLC option for independent game developers like themselves and have posted an open letter concerning the issues arising from the high fee costs.
From Nic Watt, creative director at Nnooo...
Dear sir/madam,
Thank you for emailing us regarding your new proposed fee changes for Videogame ratings in Australia (pdf located here). I am pleased to see that overall fees have been reduced. However I would like to ask that you consider introducing a cheaper option for small, independent, downloadable titles.
We are an independently financed, Sydney based videogames company who specialise in making games for WiiWare and DSiWare which, as I am sure you know, sell downloadable games for the Wii and Nintendo DSi. The majority of these games are made with much smaller budgets than your normal disc based release, usually between AUS$15,000 and AU$50,000 and they sell from AUS$3.00 to AUS$15.00. As you can appreciate we sell our games internationally and both the ESRB and PEGI have a cheaper ratings option for these sorts of games, €250 or US$500 and considering the number of consumers we have available in the EU and US those prices are very low in comparison with Australia’s AUS$1,150 or AU$2,040.
Both PEGI and ESRB allow classifications at their cheaper brackets based on the cost of development for the title. In both systems videogames which are approx. US$/€200,000 or less are allowed to make use of the cheaper rating while titles which cost more use the normal full price ones.
It is, in my opinion, imperative that Australia adopt a similar practice if Australia wants to continue to allow consumers access to these new online downloadable stores. At present, on both WiiWare and DSiWare, games are often not released or released later due to the expense of gaining a rating versus the likelihood of generating enough profit just to cover the rating cost. As you can appreciate it puts Australian consumers in a situation where they feel like global second class citizens.
I have cc-ed Bruce Thomson, our Business Director and Antony Reed of the GDAA on this email in the hope we can open a dialogue about this situation. I would be more than happy to spend time with you discussing this matter in more detail and I am also going to add a copy of this email onto out news blog, www.nnooo.com/news to encourage our consumers to also get in contact with you in regards to this matter.
I would also like to point you to a longer piece I have posted in the past regarding this issue (An open letter to the OFLC (Australian Ratings Board). This contains slightly more detail than the above.
Thanks again.
Yours,
-Nic