List of banned video games by country

Governments that have banned video games have been criticized for a correlated increase in digital piracy, limiting business opportunities and violating rights.

[1][2][3] During the first reign of the Islamic Emirate government in Afghanistan (1996–2001), Western technology and art was prohibited and this included video games.

[citation needed] Carmageddon is banned in the capital city of Buenos Aires because it depicts people being killed by motor vehicles.

In July and August 2011, all Australian state Attorneys-General agreed to instate an R18+ rating for video games, which would be available by the end of 2011.

[18] In Belgium, games such as Phantasy Star Online 2, FIFA 17, Gears of War 4, Mario Kart Tour, Call of Duty: Mobile and others have been banned due to the usage of loot boxes (which constitute gambling under the country's existing laws) and their equivalents.

[25][27] Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City was banned in Barueri because it uses music by the Brazilian composer Hamilton da Silva Lourenço without proper permission.

These lists are contained as an encrypted database in online search engines or optionally in routers or youth protection filters.

[54] As of November 15 2024, all games without a USK rating are de-facto delisted and forbidden for sale on all digital platforms in Germany after a reimplementation of the laws.

[158] Although the specific reason was not revealed, it is possible that it is because the game contains two-headed mutated cows called Brahmin, which was considered sensitive to religious beliefs.

The move came after a direction from the states of Gujarat and Jammu and Kashmir seeking a ban on the game, as it was claimed to affect the minds of youths.

It was banned in the cities of Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara, Bhavnagar and Rajkot of Gujarat, as well as all of Jammu and Kashmir including border areas .

[167] ARMA 3 is banned due to the game's portrayal of a fictional faction, which includes Iran and is an enemy of NATO.

[170] Call of Duty: Mobile's services were cancelled by developer Activision for unspecified reasons, but thought to involve United States sanctions against Iran.

[172] Valkyrie Drive: Bhikkhuni is banned for excessively glorifying homosexuality and immoral values via eroge style animation.

[173] Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds are banned in Iraq because of negative effects caused by some electronic games on the health, culture, and security of Iraqi society.

[175] In 2006, following the release of the trailer to the game Rule of Rose, the magazine Panorama ran an article claiming live burials of children at the protagonist's hand.

[180] Resident Evil 4, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Bulletstorm, Gears of War 3, Grand Theft Auto V, Dead Island, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Just Cause 2 and numerous other violent titles,[citation needed] distributed physically and digitally, were heavily edited for excessive violence, but only on the localization level; the games can still be played if the locale is switched from Japanese to English.

[183][184] Previously, the Dead Space series encountered the same fate, with all entries since the original 2008 release effectively being banned in Japan.

[187][188] In February 2010, one week after Dante's Inferno was released, the game was banned by the Jabatan Agama Islam (JAIS), a Muslim organisation in Malaysia, for depictions of Judeo-Christian hell iconography which was against Sharia, as well as cruelty and sexuality.

On July 1, 2022, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority banned PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) after a teenager allegedly shot his family of four after binging the video game for days.

[210] Games such as Call of Duty: Black Ops II and Medal of Honor have also been banned in Pakistan due to their portrayal of the country as a failed state where terrorist organizations openly operate.

However, bans issued by the NMC apply only to the sale of those products through local outlets; they do not make private ownership illegal.

[citation needed] In 2018, the NMC introduced a localised rating system for various media, including video games.

Games in the UK usually only fail to receive a certification rating (effectively a ban) when they contain real sex scenes and/or gratuitous violence.

[270] It is illegal to sell, buy or rent, but not import, a game that has not been classified by an approved age rating organisation in the UK.

[280] The Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association—which challenged a California law restricting the sale of "violent video games" (defined using a variation of the Miller test separate from ratings assigned by bodies such as the ESRB) to minors, insisting that video games were considered a protected form of expression under the First Amendment, meaning that federal or state law cannot be used to regulate their distribution based on content.

In 2012, a court found that Silicon Knights had plagiarized Epic Games' proprietary Unreal Engine, and had used it in Too Human and X-Men: Destiny, along with other unreleased projects.

[287][288][289][290] The release of Thrill Kill, an AO-rated fighting game with extreme violence and strong sexual themes, was outright cancelled by Electronic Arts (who had acquired its developer) due to objections over its content.

This was due to security concerns being raised over the game's publisher, known as Nuverse, whose parent company, ByteDance, was accused of collecting sensitive data, alongside their other applications (most notably the social media platform TikTok) and potentially sharing such information with the government of China, the company's origin of operation, which is recognized as a foreign adversary of the United States.

[165] Authorities in Uzbekistan banned a number of games over concerns that they could be "used to propagate violence, pornography, threaten security and social and political stability", most notably first-person shooters such as Call of Duty: Black Ops and Doom, horror games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil, Mortal Kombat and even relatively non-violent simulations such as The Sims.