Written by AndrewH

Google has announced that they’ll begin to use the industry standard for age ratings on Android games on Google Play. What this means is Android games will have a rating similar to the ESRB rating system which is currently accustomed to rate games on PC and console.

The new system will start today and will be run by the Entertainment Software Rating Board, the ESRB rating system you are accustomed to seeing, aside from mobile and digital games there will be a different system being adopted called IARC (International Age Rating Coalition). IARC is a relatively new system and will also be run in partnership with the ESRB in North America s along with other rating system in other locations all over the world such as the PEGI system in Europe. All of these partnerships are being done to bring “a unified procedure that simultaneously generates ratings for multiple territories while preserving all of their distinct cultural standards”.

Instead of developers needing to worry about applying different rating systems in various regions for their games that they have uploaded to Google Play, developers are now able to simply complete just one quick questionnaire once they submit their games and will also be used to create a time rating for multiple regions.

Combine this with the new reviewing process Google also announced today and that we all should see some improvement overall towards the quality of content on Google Have fun with less malware (hopefully).

Website Referenced: ESRB (PDF of press release available here) | Google Developers Blog