ESRB trying to curtail early game reveals

It's the end of an era. For a long time now the Entertainment Software Ratings Board has been a great source for spotting games that had not yet been announced. This was entirely due to the open system that was used by the ERSB's site, which allowed anyone to check a game's rating as soon as it had received one. While this was in keeping with the purpose of the ESRB (to have an easy to access resource for those who needed it; parents mostly), it was not in keeping with the goals of game publishers.

In response to requests from publishers, who were likely getting rather miffed at having their game's revealed outside of their plans for such, the ESRB is now offering the ability for games to appear on their site at specified dates. Now, when a publisher submits a game for rating they can fill in a box for the date it will see upload to the main ESRB page. While it was noted that "the ESRB system will not work for consumers if publishers arbitrarily select dates bearing no reasonable relationship to consumer interest in the product," we doubt if there is going to any publisher who doesn't take advantage of the new system and hold back ratings till the latest date possible.

Oh well. Thankfully, we still have other countries ratings boards to leak our video game info for us.