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Nicholas Lovell
Home   >   Self-Publishing   >   Marketing   >   TV celebrity goes spare because GAME refuses to sell her child inappropriate games

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TV celebrity goes spare because GAME refuses to sell her child inappropriate games

By on February 18, 2011

The games industry just can’t win.

Earlier this week, a GAME employee acted with exemplary integrity for the good of our industry. He or she refused to serve a 17 year old boy a 15-rated game without proof of ID.

“Good on GAME” is the appropriate response. Our industry is endlessly berated for selling inappropriate content to children. Here we see the leading UK retailer of video games taking its responsibilities seriously: it has trained its staff well and they behaved entirely appropriately.

Did they get credit for this? Did the Daily Mail write a story saying “Games industry refuses to sell age-rated games to our kids?”.

Mary Portas

Did they hell. The child in question was the 17 year old son of Mary Portas, the so-called Queen of Shops. She tweeted:

“STILL holding on after 8mins to spk to a human at GAME Ox st where they refused to sell my 17 yr son a 15 + game. Now they’ve cut me off.“

She got so upset that she took the matter to GAME CEO Ian Shephard (who appears to have calmed her down a bit.)

“spoke to CEO of GAME. Impressive and bright. Agreed good customer service is worth fighting for and how tough the regulations they face are“

I despair. I really do. We get pilloried for not doing enough to protect minors and when we show that our processes are working, we get pilloried again.

On this one, Queen of Shops, I think you are just plain wrong.

About Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.com