California state senator Leland Yee is currently working to screw over both gamers and Californians in general. Yee’s goal seems to  be to breathe life back into Californian initiatives to pass laws banning the sale of violent video games to minors. Such a law would only work to cost the state of California money, and California is not in a position where it has all that much money left.

Every time a law is passed to regulate the sale of violent video games, it is always struck down by the courts. Back in 2007, one Judge Whyte got rid of the original law in California, nothing that there is no real evidence implying that violent video games make children into societal menaces. When a similar law was struck down in Michigan, the judge in that case noted that not only is the data non-existent, but any such law is a violation of the First Amendment; a law which prohibits freedom of expression is unconstitutional.

Economically these laws make no sense because they just cost the state money. A group of some sort is bound to sue the state and win its case. …

China has expanded its list of things to make pure for its citizens. In addition to crackdowns on search engine results and pornography sites, China announced a new initiative called the “China Green Online Games Publishing Program.” CGOGPP will act as the red tape for online games that want to make it on the Chinese market. If CGOGPP decides that the game you submitted violates its policies, it will be illegal for you to release it online. The goal of the initiative is to “clean up” the  video game market, which Chinese officials claim is largely populated by products which suck in players to make an unlawful profit.

This isn’t really a surprising move on China’s part. Recently, they’ve been more and more concerned with what people are doing online. The country shut down Twitter a few weeks back to keep some riots on the down low, and that’s definitely a step beyond passing laws to determine what sort of content is allowed to see the light of day.

While Chinese officials have yet to define what it means for a game to be “green” and thus pass inspection, it’s probably a safe …

Image via CNET

Naoya Matsui, head of the Sony’s product planning division, said in an interview that Sony had “planned to release a PSP model without a UMD drive since the vey beginning.” Mr. Matsui added that the only reason the UMD was ever created was because back in 2005, the infrastructure for digital media was not on part with the physical persuasion. So thanks to how far the internet has come in four years, we now have the PSP Go (or at least that seems to be the thinking behind this). While that last part has merit, it all sounds like prepared marketing talk.

You don’t call something a “Universal Media Disk” if you intend to phase it out from the start! Sony wanted to UMD to be a standard for portable, and for more than just games. But they miscalculated. As Yahtzee put it, no one wanted to pay for Full Metal Jacket again just to watch it in “teeny weeny eye-strain-o-vision.” The Sony fanboys will certainly disagree, but this does not ring with the sound of truth.

The Australian federal government has decided that the internet is going to be a kid-friendly place. A bill that looks set to become law will ban the sale of video games rated as being for people above 15 – the MA15+ rating, from being sold online. Presumably, the intent behind this decision is to prevent someone under the age of 15 from going on Steam, lying about their age, and then using their mothers’ credit cards to buy something rated for people older.

This is a pretty stupid prevention method as all it really does is set back the onset of digital distribution. As anyone who still plays PC games can probably attest, not having to go to Gamestop, but instead buying a game online and having it registered to an account that will allow you to download that game whenever you want, is really cool. It also puts more money in the hands of developers as they do not have to go through a company like EA to have the game physically published.

The other problem with this is the problem that we should all have with any sort of law that …

All too often we make claims that piracy does not do much harm and that the actions of content owners are bizarrely aggrandized compared to the crimes committed by individuals (hundred thousand dollar fines for downloading ten songs is  a bit much). But today when The Sims 3, the next installment in one of the best selling game series of all time, leaked onto torrent sites, we have found a real instance of something which could cause significant harm to the game’s sales. The original story mentions how piracy raised awareness of the draconian digital rights management (DRM) in Spore, Electronic Arts’ big game of last year, which thus harmed the game’s reception, but in the case of The Sims 3, as with most games, the concern is not so much the perception of DRM as the perception of the quality of the game.