I was talking about bg3 and how a certain part could be changed to be much darker, and it occurred to me that it possibly could affect the rating of the game if they did (being vague purposely to avoid spoilers). But then I wondered “do things like that even have to be reviewed by the rating boards?” Because Larian has made a lot of changes like that to the game and I imagine it would be pretty ludicrous to have each and every one be reviewed to see if it fits within the current ESRB and PEGI ratings of the game.
I think BG3 already has the highest rating available, so I don’t think it’d be affected.
For substantial changes, the rating would have to be redone, but I don’t think many games add content that would effect the ESRB/PEGI system. Also, in many countries, the ratings are optional in the first place; ESRB and PEGI were the result of the games industry coming together to regulate themselves before the government would (because governments would probably ban most games if they didn’t).
As far as I’m aware, the legal standard only applies to the age rating, so it would be important that this doesn’t change.
The rating boards themselves have contracts with publishers. For PEGI this seems to come down to “re-submit if your changes alter the age rating or damage our ability to do our (legally obligated) job”. ESRB has a policy for DLC (“In most cases, the rating assigned to a game also applies to its DLC. However, if the DLC content exceeds the rating assigned to the “core” product, it must be submitted, and a different rating may be assigned to the DLC.”).
I think once a game has a certain rating (horror, 16+) and sticks within those boundaries, it should be fine. GTA had an issue with this during the Hot Coffee debacle (in which mods could add some kind of half-finished sex minigame) which caused the age rating to be changed, but that’s the only time I remember the age rating ever going up after the fact.
