Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

I understand the intention of the rule, but here is an interesting problem:

I make a racing game, a realistic racing game, with real life tracks.

Those tracks are laser scanned and officially licensed from the people who own the branding of the tracks.

As part of the licensing deal, we cannot alter anything to do with advertising on the track. This has already caused some issues with, for example, Hockenheim where they have beer commercials on track, Which affects our age rating - and console submission.

Functionally, we have no control over these advertisements, do you think we would be in violation of the rule? They say not right now, but the specific carve out is "if it seems out of place", which is vague enough to cause my "lawyers spend a lot of time on uncertainty" sense to tingle.

These kinds of “sounds reasonable” rules are really cumbersome and bureaucratic when they face reality.

I take it you did not click on the article at all before commenting.

Racing games with real advertisements on the cars are explicitly given as an example as the type of thing that is fine in the article.

They literally cover racing games in the article but the money quote is:

> Product placement is still in, so long as "such portrayals are not disruptive and are appropriate within the context of the game."

It also notes that these rules are not new and merely the page is.

Did you really write this whole post without reading the article?

Sounds like you could even be selling ad space in the game on those cars/tracks and its totally fine because its not out of place. Same if you had a game set in a city with a billboard that some corporation paid to advertise on. Its not out of place.

This is pretty clearly written as a ban against mobile game style ads where it "gates" gameplay.

> Product placement is still in, so long as "such portrayals are not disruptive and are appropriate within the context of the game." Valve gives a racing game with real life sponsors on the cars as one example of what's okay […]

There is your answer, right in the article.

Of course, as a developer dealing with licensing issues you should ask for explicit clarification, but that's to be expected.

And yeah, the age rating going up because you choose to show beer ads makes complete sense. That's not about advertising, but about the fact that you are including adult themes (like drinking alcohol) in a game. Even fictional beer like Duff or Pißwasser will trigger that.

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