DOOM and DOOM 2 now legal in Germany

Just to be clear: Doom was legal to buy, own and play before if you are over 18. Now it's free to put up ads for it and sell it openly.
There are two ways a game can be indexed in Germany.
The one is the index list Doom was on.
They can't be sold in the open, but they can on demand to persons over 18.
The second is when games get 'beschlagnahmt', confiscated.
Then the games are actually illegal to sell at all and illegal to own.
Games like Wolfenstein 3D, The Darkness and Dead Rising are confiscated, at least the uncut versions.
However, even the 'normal' index poses a big problem for big retailers like Media Markt (like Best Buy, I guess) because they can't put up ads for indexed games and can't put them on the shelves.
They generally do not sell or import games in demand. Small gamestores tend to do that, though.
Steam is too lazy or incompetent to implement a working age-check, so they just ban all germans from buying certain games.

/edit:
Also, most 'Indizierungen' happen because of violence, 'Beschlagnahmungen' because of Nazi-symbolics. Although excessive violence can get a game the 'confiscated' status, like Manhunt, Mortal Combat, Soldier of Fortune...
 
yes I many people get very very easily confused by our system thinking "they ban everything". But thats quite not true.

I would say violence today is not anymore a problem like it was in the past. As long you don't have nazis any game should be fine.

It does not happen that frequently that games get rated 18+ that would make it literaly "porn".
 
Actually its still legal to own Wolfenstein 3D, you are not allowed to:
buy or sell it, but if you allready owned it before the ban than its perfectly legal for you to have it.

Most movies that are actually banned, are also legal to own.

And Spear of destiny the prequel to Wolfenstein, wich is pretty much indentical to Wolfenstein 3D is only "indexed" even if it has all the nazi symbols, sounds etc.


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But that people think we ban everything really is true :( They also think
there are no guns in germany... while in reality the german gun clubs have like 2 million members and there are over 14 million legal guns in this country.
 
Yeah, our laws are pretty confusing.
You're right, confiscated games are legal to own, I got it mixed up.
See, that's how fucked up they are :D
Thanks to a revision of the Jugendschutzgesetz, we now have an official "18+" rating, making those ratings worth something.
Before, we had "18+" ratings, but they were ineffective, so violent games got indexed rather than getting that rating.
But now they realized that it's pretty damn stupid to index every second game, so the "18+" rating happens a lot more often.
Still, it seems that non-german publishers didn't get that memo, so they censor their games preemptively.
 
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