FTC: Retailers Enforce Ratings Better for Games Than DVDs

Apr 13, 2007 3:00 AM

WASHINGTON -- The Federal Trade Commission‘s latest report to Congress on the movie, music and video-game industries‘ self-regulatory programs and marketing of violent entertainment products to children found “significant improvement by video-game retailers, particularly in national retail chains, but little or no improvement by movie theaters, or DVD and music retailers,” the FTC reported yesterday. Bo Andersen, president of the Entertainment Merchants Association, Encino, Calif., said that the association accepts the challenge to extend the game retailing performance to DVDs. “We are very gratified, but frankly not surprised, by the FTC‘s findings that video game retailers have demonstrably and significantly increased the level of enforcement of the ‘mature‘ rating for video games at the point of sale,” Andersen said. “Retailers have improved their enforcement of store policies restricting the sale of mature-rated games by 362% -- from a 16% to a 58% turn-down rate -- since the FTC‘s first shopping survey in 2000 and almost doubled the turn-down rate since the last survey in the fall of 2003." “EMA is dedicated to replicating that success in the R-rated DVD sales market.”