After junking Balatro's 18 rating, PEGI will develop "a more granular" rating system for gambling themes

rockpapershotgun.com:

Sorcerous cardgame Balatro and slot machine RPG Luck Be A Landlord have been reclassified as fit for people aged 12 years and over by the Pan European Games Information board, after they were initially slapped with an 18 rating for "glamorising... the simulation of gambling".

PEGI have made the change following a successful appeal against the 18 rating by Balatro's European publisher Sold Out and Luck Be A Landlord's Switch publisher Fangamer. They're also going to develop "a more granular set of classification criteria" for games that reference gambling, to distinguish jingling parodies of rentier capitalism from the one arm bandits found in actual casinos.

To catch you up, Balatro was pulled from certain digital stores in March last year after it was recategorised as an 18+ game. In a statement, the publishers attributed this to an unspecified rating's board "mistaken belief that the game 'contains prominent gambling imagery and materials that instructs about gambling'". In comments on Reddit shortly after, the game's developer Localthunk confirmed that the ratings board in question was PEGI. "I still believe that the rating is unwarranted, but there is some grey area for interpretation from PEGI and at this point it is what it is," he wrote. "I think the one thing I am most disappointed by is the fact that other games with actual gambling mechanics aren't rated the same way because of their appearance/theme."

Luck Be A Landlord, meanwhile, was banned from Google Play in 13 countries in August 2023 after the game was found to be in violation of the platform's policies about gambling. In January this year, Google threatened to ban the game globally unless developers TrampolineTales updated its listing to specify that it "contains gambling".

All of which may seem ridiculous if you've played either game. To draw some basic distinctions, Balatro features poker cards and poker-style mechanics, but does not involve the waging of real money, and is fundamentally a