Bad news today for the gaming community. The german government institution BPjS which tasks are to:
- Prohibit, punishment-reinforced, youth-endangering media on request by youth ministers and their offices so that these are only accessible by adults, not however by children (by definition
Promotion of worth-oriented media education
Sensitization of the public for problems of the youth media protection
now has added Unreal Tournament and Return To Castle Wolfenstein to the index list. This implies that public sale (even on Ebay or similiar), promotion/advertisement and reporting about these titles is prohibited by law.
E.g. all names of depicted persons were changed and all german 3rd reich insignia have been removed. Additionally the germans and the whole plot were turned into a fanatical sect named The Wolfs aiming to rule the world by dark powers.
As if such a downturn of a splendid action title was not enough due to the sales prohibition retailers will remove any quantities from stock because these represent dead money.
Due to the risk of their titles being indexed most game developers have switched to a drastic localization tactic to guarantee those games a long shelf life. This implies though that mostly no english version makes it to the german market (action titles mostly).