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Hello German people on Pouet,

We are discussing the German games market at work and we're wondering how it is now with all the censoring and green blood. Are games like GTA and Call of Duty for sale normally now? Or is there still ridiculous censoring going on?

ridiculous censoring.

although both gta and COD are on sale and not that much censored i think, but GOW2 and lef 4 dead are (will be ) not

a few days ago a colleague told me that one still needs blood-patches and such for german exes

gnaa, what i wanted to say is: GOW2 is not censored, but officially not even on sale in Germany because of potetial ratings it would get.

Interestingly TF2 was censored at first (no blood, random items instead of gore - but IMHO this made the game even funnier :) but then whoopsie daisy wasn't anymore after an automatic update.

@okkie:
actually censoring is still going on very well here. already "halflife" was one of the games that totally lost athmosphere because of that. me and my friends always try to get original games and films so that we can do a judgement about it.
blood became green, GSG9 became robots... bullshit in general

These are the actual categories in germany:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altersfreigabe
"keine Jugendfreigabe" means 18+ and can still be modified!
don't think the other ones are modified.

in fact:
lot of filmes and games are still modified in germany. they cut out scenes and change blood to green color...
sometimes I still recognize cutted films on tv, but I only play games in non german versions. I cannot really say if they are all modified nowadays or not. but I've seen lot of modified german games.

Lots of games are censored here, but it's getting better than it was 5 years ago or so. Back in the days games like Half-Life 1 were censored. When a doctor was shot he just sat down. Bodies of dead people disappeared after a few seconds. In "No one lives forever" dead people disappeared but their backpack was still lying on the floor so that you were able to look for items and things.

Today some strange things happen. The ultra brutal Dead Space from EA got the approval from the USK and is now on sale here in the same version as in US, while Gears of War 2 won't be released here. Censorship still happens in lots of games, but it's not such a disaster as in the past.

Personally I don't care much about censorship in games. I still have a lot of fun even without blood in shooters.

isn't that more of a common thing with any shooter game? :)

The edited-movies-for-tv broadcast thing is mainly so they can show 18+ movies earlier (read: before 11 pm), and get more cash for ads.



Technically, it's passive agressive regulation (can't sell 'indexed' games to minors, can't advertise them, can't put them on the shelf, but it's legal to sell them to adults), rather than censorship. Not that it matters, it never worked anyway. ;)

The edited-movies-for-tv broadcast thing is mainly so they can show 18+ movies earlier (read: before 11 pm), and get more cash for ads.



Technically, it's passive agressive regulation (can't sell 'indexed' games to minors, can't advertise them, can't put them on the shelf, but it's legal to sell them to adults), rather than censorship. Not that it matters, it never worked anyway. ;)

Wow, my first double post. (I thought this problem has been fixed?)

@tomatoes,
and also if they are indexed and you can't do any advertising for it, german versions still are modified/cutted...
I already knew that about the broadcasts but also DVD's are cutted.

actual example rambo with 23 cuts and 2min cutted out in germany.
http://www.schnittberichte.com/schnittbericht.php?ID=4055428

http://www.schnittberichte.com
lists over 4500 cuts in germany in all categories 304 are games.

excuse my spelling I meant tomaes

there is a difference between movies/games that are 18+ and movies/games that have been denied a rating or simply did not apply for one. you may not advertise the later one, put them up for sale on the shelf or make them accessible to minors in any way. this usually means a huge loss of revenue for the publishers so they cut out scenes or modify features to "at least" get an 18+ rating.

18+ titles are free to be advertised, solld to adults and put on the shelf in whatever shop you got. just you have to make sure not to sell it to minors. i am quite sure, and the linked page also says so that "rambo" was 18+ ("keine jugendfreigabe").

there is no "real censorship" of stuff here in germany (apart from swastikas and all that stuff..) when it comes to movies or games,
it is all done by (ab)using market force and make games that the "USK" (the ones who check games) does not want to be released here in germany very unprofitable...hence they modify or cut our stuff to get an appropriate rating (the same is being done with games and movies in america and every other country that has such a system as well -> lower rating get's you a bigger target-group).

it is in no way illegal to buy or own these games (from abroad, if neccessary) if you are over 18. and with the age of the internet, many german onlineshops order a stack of "gears of war 2" from austria and sell it, legally, since they know their peers...

cheers lads! Thanks for the responses.

Steam: Yeah, well, it's censorship in a way when games substitute gore with green and humans with zombies. It doesn't really matter for what reason they do this :)

but you actually say that, nvrmnd

Okkie : we had this discussion at work while tweaking the visuals of Far Cry 2. I suggested that we replaced blood splatters with sausage splatters but luckily the uncensored version eventually made it :D

Still, you could give this solution a try, I'm pretty sure germans would love it :)

sausage squirts even :)

and replace swastikas with ?

okkie: i buy everything in english. not only games. the translation/censoring stuff is an insult to my intelligence. games/tvshows(especially futurama) and so on. the cencored versions of games are in general more buggy than the non censored... Windows XP german version has 100mb more commited memory than the english version. also i think having everything translated and then wondering why the pisa-study finds out that german people cant speak/read english worth a fuck ... i do not even dare to comment this stupidity :)

okkie: i did not want to say that i like this system. i just think "censorship" is quite a harsh word for it, if you consider that all hollywood movies and most games are being cut to match some rating, this is done pre-release though, so sometimes you will have a "directors cut" or "uncut version" later on. it is just that there exists an uncut version before the germans demad cutting, and that makes people shout "censorship"...while the same process was applied before, just that a 12+ rating in the netherlands is different from 12+ in germany (for whatever reasons there are).

the only thing that is really fishy about the german system, i think, is that there is something "above" 18+ that effectively makes it impossible to buy the product for a reasonable price, in german stores. but that is slowly being "attacked" by onlinestores from abroad...so *shrug*. I always wondered why there are no more "small video game stores" that "specialise" on 18+ games...but i guess there simply is/was no market.

If Europeans learn to speak English we can't have any more funny Engrish scrolltexts! :(

Sweden used to have a censoring board for movies that cut heavily in action and horror flicks, almost to the point where you couldn't follow the plot anymore. I think it pretty much abolished itself a couple of years ago since it was no point in doing that when the Internet is around.

steam: Fair enough. But most ratings keep the content intact, where for the German market heavy changes were required to get a certain rating which is still getting you on the store-shelves.

i've always wondered about this specifically german censorship : is it a consequence of the german political class feeling guilty for the WW2 violence ?

too bad war losers are always the ones to be blamed, the americans have never really expressed any guilty/sorry feeling about the first (and only) nuclear bombs launched at civilians...