Supreme Court Upholds Gamers' Rights!
Why is this a good thing, exactly? Well, we have the ESRB that rates our video games. They are not affiliated with the government and have set up their own procedures for testing and rating the games. Currently, they do not rate the games based on sitting down and actually play them. They make the video game makers give them specific data and scripts that the ESRB reviews. This saves them a lot of time and prevents the ESRB from leaking data about the games to the public. Timing when a game comes out is key to good sales and many places will not sell games unless they have an ESRB rating. Therefore, it is important that game publishers work with the ESRB to get the game out the door in a timely manner. You cannot just review it from start to finish like a movie because some games, like Fallout, have over a hundred hours of playtime, and games like Mass Effect 2 have multiple scenarios and require many runs through to reach every scenario.
So, if the government controls the rating system, they will have to rate everything through the games like they do with movies... This means that some games will take many, many months more time to be reviewed to be released publicly. Some games are based off of things like movies. Take for instance Transformers 3... The movie is not done whenever they are making the game. If they want the game to come out when the movie does, they need to push back the starting date, which means that they have even less resources and information to work with when they are making their games.... It's very sad to see that this could have negatively effected so many bad things.
On another note, if I wanted to sale my games that I make, I would have to get my games rated,too!! Do you think that would be free? No... I would have to stop making games...