A report from the UK House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media, and Sport has revealed that body’s preference in BBFC ratings over the industry self-regulating PEGI system. The BBFC ratings are currently used to classify film.

In the report, the committee maintains that BBFC ratings are more “thorough and rigorous" than the PEGI system, and that the BBFC symbols “command greater confidence”. According to the report, games that for whatever reason had to be classified by the BBFC (if they, for example, contained film clips) were subjected to five hours or reviewed playtime typically, with some special cases—Manhunt 2 was examined for 100 hours.

The PEGI system begins with publishers answering a questionnaire about the game’s content, after which a preliminary age rating will be assessed. If that rating is high enough, the game will go to the non-profit Video Standards Council, where it will be played for typically two to three hours to confirm the rating.

The Select Committee report did cite several industry concerns that highlighted PEGI's advantages over the BBFC. Paul Jackson, the director general of ELSPA, told the committee that PEGI was a “scalable resource” in a way that only a self-regulating industry body could be, and questioned the BBFC’s ability to maintain the necessary resources to keep up with an ever-expanding game medium. EA VP Keith Ramsdale suggested it might be more appropriate to apply PEGI in a similar manner to the American ESRB, saying, “that is a self-regulatory system and it works.” 

Representatives from Microsoft told the committee that the BBFC lacks content descriptors that PEGI has, making the current industry system a more informative one. The publisher also expressed to the UK government the strengths and simplicity of PEGI’s consistent use across the entirety of the European market.

Despite these objections, the government report still believes that the BBFC ratings are a powerful option for the games industry, thanks to strong consumer recognition of that ratings system and the group’s thorough ratings process. Currently the government is assessing a hybrid ratings system that would use both organizations, as was recommended earlier this year by the Byron Report. The committee report however admits that this solution is controversial.

The committee’s final recommendation is that the BBFC should continue to rate games with adult content, but that the group should have the responsibility of rating content for the over-12 age group as well. It also stated hope that PEGI would work with the BBFC to develop a “single system”.