India’s First Game Rating Standard: Real Need or Overreach?

By nearly every measure, India is one of the most consequential gaming markets on the planet. And until March 2026, it had no standardized domestic framework telling parents, platforms, or publishers what the content of a game actually was, or who it was designed for.

That changed when the Bureau of Indian Standards notified IS 19690:2026 on March 10, 2026. It is not a regulatory crackdown, nor an attempt to replicate the regulatory frameworks Europe or America built three decades ago. It is a classification standard, built by a committee that included industry voices alongside government and media representatives, and designed to reflect what Indian families actually need to know about the games their children are playing.

However, it raises the question of whether we actually need something like it when we already have the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) and other global regulatory agencies. 

How Game Rating Systems Actually Came to Exist

Age rating systems for video games were not built in the gaming community’s best interests. They were built under duress, in response to public outrage. When Mortal Kombat arrived in arcades in 1992, the game's digitized sprites of real actors executing each other through spinal extractions and decapitations were a genuine departure from anything that had preceded it.

When Acclaim brought Mortal Kombat to home consoles in September 1993, a marketing campaign dubbed "Mortal Monday" ensured it reached millions of living rooms simultaneously. United States (US) Senators Joe Lieberman and Herb Kohl brought the game in front of two Senate committees alongside Night Trap, a full-motion video title that had already been pulled from shelves by major retailers. They were unhappy with the content that was being presented to young Americans. The hearings ran in the Senate from December 1993 through March 1994.

The Senate gave the entertainment industry a clear ultimatum: establish your own classification system or have one imposed by the federal government. It led to the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), founded in September 1994 under what would become the Entertainment Software Association. The ESRB's first rating scale ran from Early Childhood to Adults Only, with Mortal Kombat receiving the newly minted M for Mature. The system was created in a year. 

Europe followed suit nearly a decade later. In April 2003, the Interactive Software Federation of Europe launched the Pan European Game Information system (PEGI) in an attempt to unify frameworks across 36 countries on the continent. PEGI was built on a model borrowed from the Dutch film classification system, Kijkwijzer, and at the request of EU institutions rather than in response to a legislative threat like in America’s case. 

By 2012, ESRB and PEGI joined with other national bodies to form the International Age Rating Coalition, or IARC, designed to solve the digital distribution problem outside the US and Europe. India, which was simultaneously experiencing the rise of video games in recent decades, consumed all of this through the imported frameworks. 

The Lack of an Age Rating System in India

The numbers made the absence of a framework increasingly difficult to ignore. India has over 500M gamers, a figure that is only set to grow. In August 2024, the All India Game Developers Forum (AIGDF) published a white paper, produced alongside the Indian Governance and Policy Project and titled India's Gaming Industry: Time For Age & Content Ratings? The paper was direct about the scale of the problem. India lacked a standardized age-rating framework, which is something that is present in virtually every comparable gaming market globally.

The AIGDF also raised a concern that the industry had been articulating informally for years, but that had not yet been formalized in a policy document. Foreign rating systems were not built to flag the content categories that Indian families actually worry about. They proposed that any domestic framework should incorporate categories and descriptors that reflect the cultural sensitivities and legal requirements unique to the Indian context, and that this focus on regional sensitivity was consistent with the Code of Ethics under the IT Rules 2021.

IS 19690:2026 was notified on March 10, 2026, having been formulated by the Media and Entertainment Services Sectional Committee, designated SSD 13, which brought together representatives from industry, government, and media.

The standard defines six age bands:

• U/A 0+ for content suitable across all ages
• U/A 3+ and U/A 7+ for younger audiences with minimal mature content
• U/A 13+ and U/A 16+ for progressively more mature themes appropriate for teenagers
• A (Adults Only) for graphic violence and explicit material

The framework is currently voluntary. No Quality Control Order (QCO) has been issued, making the framework’s compliance mandatory in the country. There is also no Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) notification that ties distribution rights to obtaining a BIS classification. The standard is, at this stage, available for any publisher to adopt. There may be regulatory intent from the Indian government in the future. As of now, it is not a formal framework that video game publishers have to abide by. 

Where PEGI Works and Where it Does Not

PEGI is a fully constructed system that has achieved something difficult. It has meaningful, consistent adoption across 36 countries with governments, child protection bodies, and regulatory cultures that do not always agree on very much. The system has classified over 40K games since 2003. It updates its criteria when the market changes, most recently announcing in March 2026 that games with paid random items such as loot boxes will receive a PEGI 16 classification by default from June 2026 onwards.

PEGI was built by European industry bodies, for European regulators, to address European content concerns. The same framework does not necessarily map cleanly onto India. The AIGDF white paper was explicit on this point: foreign systems ignore "regional cultural factors" that matter deeply under Indian law and the Code of Ethics under the IT Rules 2021.

Rating systems only function as intended when the people they are designed for can actually understand and trust them. A PEGI 12 label communicates very little to a parent in Patna or Coimbatore who has no exposure to European classification systems and no easy way to verify what the 12 icon certifies. A domestic label, using visual language already familiar from OTT classification, removes that friction and gives the system a realistic chance of actually influencing parenting decisions.

Indian developers need a rating system to be discoverable in family segments of digital markets. IS 19690's self-assessment model is explicitly designed to make that process accessible to studios that cannot afford the overhead of an international classification process.

India's gaming market is forecast to reach $7.8B by 2030. The AVGC sector is positioning itself as a significant employment and export engine. A credible, domestically designed rating system communicates that India's gaming ecosystem has developed the institutional depth to operate as a serious global market.

The Real Risks of an Indian Age Rating System

There are concerns about IS 19690 that are worth taking seriously. The major international publishers already maintain simultaneous compliance with PEGI, ESRB, and IARC processes. Adding a distinct Indian classification exercise could lead to additional costs. For large publishers with dedicated localization and compliance teams, this is manageable. For mid-size international studios assessing whether an India launch is commercially viable at a given moment, it adds friction to a market that is already resistant to spending money on games.

If IS 19690 becomes mandatory and enforcement is consistent, some publishers will delay or avoid India launches rather than absorb the compliance cost. Indonesia's mandatory rating requirement for Steam, which came into effect in January 2026, was immediately followed by reports of erratic age classifications and concern among developers and players about which titles would remain available in the market. India's regulatory bodies will need to watch how that experiment resolves.

IS 19690:2026 is simply an enforcement mechanism. It is a voluntary specification that any publisher can adopt, built by a committee that includes the people who actually understand how games are made and distributed. What it does is establish the classification architecture before the regulatory pressure to do so becomes unavoidable. That is, in hindsight, how every functioning rating system in the world was built. 

For the Indian gaming industry, the practical implication is that the runway into strict regulation now exists. Publishers who adopt the standard voluntarily are positioning themselves ahead of any potential future mandatory requirement and building familiarity with a classification process that will look increasingly familiar to Indian consumers. Developers who have been operating without any domestic classification pathway now have one. Parents who have been navigating a patchwork of foreign labels now have access to a framework designed to address their specific concerns.

Whether IS 19690 remains a helpful voluntary toolkit or eventually becomes the spine of mandatory classification rules is anyone’s guess. What happens next depends on how the framework is interpreted and implemented by the industry.