I know, weird right? If I had to guess a figure, I'd probably say around 20% of games released nowadays were M-rated, but, according to ERSB, it's actually as low as 5%

What's even weirder is how this is actually a low for the industry for many years, M-rated games peaked at a 12% high in 2005, in which the number has been declining ever since.

However, thinking about the past year, and some of the best games, very few are actually M-Rated. I mean, Super Mario Galaxy 2, DKCR, Kirby's Epic Yarn, Halo: Reach, Monster Hunter Tri, Metroid: Other M, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Red Dead Redemption, Pokemon, Bit. Trip RUNNER, Professor Layton...all big games, yet few of these are M-Rated.

Maybe that's the world we live in, where, although there's plenty of great games which aren't M-Rated (and, admittadly, plenty of poor games), the biggest selling, and most prolific, games are the ones which cause the most contraversy, and, of course, most of which are M-Rated (*cough* We Dare *cough*). COD, GTA and co. are examples of this, these are the games which sell the most; have the most hype, maybe even I follow trends nowadays when it comes to this sort of thing?

At any rate, enjoy your graph, and write what you think of the situation below:

Er? Halo Reach and AC: Brotherhood are rated M, and Red Dead Redemption is rated super duper M.

Over here in the UK, we count 'M' as '18 '

However, none of those mentioned games are 18 , a few 16 , but no 18

Must have different criteria over in America

At any rate, I updated the OP to take into account this issue

Oh. Since the chart was referencing ESRB, I just ASSumed.

Rating really doesn't matter anymore. Games can be good no matter what rating anyways.

Agreed

Rating is placed too highly nowadays, but plenty of people won't buy a game because it's a 3 (Or E?), because they believe it's 'childish'

I made a thread a few months back about age ratings and how useless they are anyway. No-one looks at them and games get 'discriminated' against due to having a rating which clashes with the gamers style.

THAT MAKES NO SENSE

and only half of those games actually deserve it, there was nothing mature about Halo or CoD

That's how my friends feel about Ratchet & Clank. Not because of the rating though, just because of the clean nature of the game.

that's probably because more and more mini-games are released (especially for phones/tablets)

We Dare wasn't rated M though and that was the contraversy -- a sex game rated appropriate for children....