SolidSnakex said:
Do PEGI and USK have different requirements when it comes to rating games (like having a final code)? I ask because the ESRB and the Australian ratings board have already rated the game. So it doesn't really make sense that PEGI or USK haven't either unless they have different requirements.
Complex answer.
From what I know at this point - and I'm not 100% positive so take the following with the grain of salt - there will be no Blu-Ray recordable (AKA "debug console") review-code for GT5, review-codes will come as usual retail-Blu Ray. Once the game passes PEGI/USK it will be printed as press-code (retail game with special disc-art, boxing and corresponding materials) and sent to journalists. I have never seen any debug-code for any GT game in my life, all codes I got from GT3 onwards (including Concept, GT4: Prologue, GT4, GT5: Prologue and other various demo codes) were always console-mastered (fully mastered DVD/Blu-Ray, never "-R" discs).
Since GT5 will come to Europe in around 10 languages, PEGI/USK have to validate all the content, in-game txt and complete soundtrack.
We may just presume that some of the delay COULD be because of the problem with European (and not just European to be honest) translations, because 10 translations of game of such scale (Chinese and Japanese are done for the Asian market) is just not easy task.
You remember that GT5 is produced in 12 languages, so we may just imagine the bahamuth task of translation for just "Museum" and "About the Car" parts of the game.
And ESRB certification could be done because English was probably done in parallel with original Japanese, and then all subsidiaries begun translations from English to their languages (French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Swedish, Chezch, Portugese, Greek, Polish and probably few more - take a look all countries that PAL is covering:
http://uk.playstation.com/country-selector/).
And at PEGI site you can see the country flags for 29 countries (Germany is not there, hence the USK board-existance) at Prologue's classification for instance.
So, there lies my analogy.