About the EOCS
Just a quick post about the EOCS since there might be some confusion about what they’re about.
The EOCS is a self-regulated body with most of the directors being the head guys from major eroge companies like Alicesoft and Nexton. And the aims of the regulations imposed by the EOCS are to avoid any sort of government intervention or police intervention
The reason why eroge companies want to have their games approved by the EOCS is for their own protection. Basically, if any of their games become a problem in society and there is police intervention or legal action involved, their responsibility can be shifted to the EOCS because they can say that their game has passed the checks by the EOCS.
This also applies for shops that sell games that have the EOCS mark on it. As they would not be responsible for anything they sell as it has been approved by the EOCS.
Distributors will not accept games that have not been reviewed by either the EOCS or the CSA, and the EOCS is also named as the designated review committee for PC games in 21 prefectures in Japan, so it is technically impossible to release any adult games without going through one of these organizations. That is the same for professional games released through DLsite too.
There were comments mentioning how the EOCS banned lolita and that didn’t work. The EOCS didn’t explicitly ban loli content, what basically happened was that in 2001 they banned the use of schoolbags and kindergarten clothes for use in a sexual context.
In 2005, they added the regulation that a character’s height cannot be shorter than 5 heads when featured on a game’s package, poster, flyer, and homepage. And when featured within the game, characters that are infants or look completely like infants are not allowed. Also when in-game, if a character is compared to the height of another character and it is very obvious that one is an adult and one is a very young child, the developers might be asked to fix it.
Also for in-game, a plethora of terms that might refer to a character’s age or suggest that a character is under 18 are NG words.
It is possible that the “ban on rape games” might be something along these lines, we will have to see when more details of the new regulations are released.
And lastly there is the Contents Soft Association (CSA) which is the less popular other self-regulating body that also rates eroge and they’re sanctioned by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Companies can choose to be members of either the EOCS or CSA and have their games rated by the respective organizations.
It is said that while they are more lenient in some areas as compared to the EOCS, they are also stricter in other areas, so they haven’t been too different from the EOCS. Though it’s true that they don’t have any explicit restrictions on loli content that EOCS enforces as mentioned above.
Currently the CSA has not announced anything about the current situation, but I would be amazed if they don’t restrict rape games too, with the direction that everything is going right now.
