Getting a Japanese CERO age rating for your game costs extra per platform

https://www.esrb.org/ratings/ratings-process/

This is both unrealistic and impossible in 2024. There's an almost infinite number of choice combinations that a player can make, some of which can enable access to unique / hidden content, and there's no way to test them all.

Imagine e.g. an easter-egg side quest that involves the player going into a brothel, but that only activates if some NPC notices you're wearing a specific piece of armor, which has a 30% chance of dropping from a monster that you don't strictly need to kill to finish the entire game.

Not to mention content patches, intentional easter eggs, scenes which should technically be inaccessible to players but can still be accessed due to bugs[1] and so on.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_(minigame)

If you think about that for ten seconds you'll realize how absurd it is, and if you google it for ten more you'll find out that they actually just watch a short video (which the game maker must prepare, and sign a contract promising that it shows all the necessary elements of the game).

Random search result that describes the process: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/how-to-get-an-age-rat...

And while in the west this sounds kind of like a niche thing, a substantial number of the bigger games that have come out of Japan (excluding those from the AAA studios) either started their distribution with physical sales at conventions or their developers started off that way before they got enough of a following to just publish digitally and avoid the hassle.

So there's not really a clear cutoff between "studios" small enough to avoid the ire of the law and those large enough to afford getting all the ratings fees, etc paid for.