Every year, the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) compiles statistics for all of the video games that they rated. This year, we’re very happy to see that of nearly 1,800 games that were rated, 60% were rated E for Everyone and another 16% were rated E10+ for Everyone 10+. We think it’s great news that the video game industry has once again achieved family friendly ratings for over 75% of the games they released. And, we believe that you can really count on the ESRB to do a good job of rating games appropriately. Of all of the games the Five Hens have reviewed this year, we agreed with 100% of the ESRB’s ratings. But don’t take our word for it. According to information on the ESRB’s website lots of other parents agree with the ratings as well:

According to a study conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates in November 2005, parents agreed with the ESRB ratings 82% of the time, while another 5% of the time the ratings were thought to be “too strict”. A recent study, published in April 2007 by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), found that 87% of parents are “somewhat” to “very” satisfied with the ESRB ratings, and 64% agree with ratings “all,” “nearly all” or “most of the time.” In fact, in a study published in 2007 by the Kaiser Family Foundation about parental views of media rating systems for television, films, music and video games, 58% of parents said they consider the ESRB rating system to be “very useful” (the highest percentage among the various rating systems), and 91% found ESRB ratings to be either “very useful” or “somewhat useful.“