- You announce a new content descriptor "In-Game purchases" in august 2018 (https://pegi.info/news/new-in-game-purchases-descriptor), but I do not see it listed on the page https://pegi.info/what-do-the-labels-mean, why?

For a very simple reason: our website is only half-finished for the moment. In the coming weeks however, the information should gradually return to the website.

We have performed a complete (and very complex) overhaul of our back-end system, and this has had consequences for the public website. As a result, we still need to restore a number of languages, pages and parts of information. Adding the in-game purchases descriptor information is on that to-do list.

- The rating system is pretty well explained on your website, but the content descriptors attribution (Violence, Bad Language, Sex...) is, in my view, not very clear: how do you attribute the content descriptors?

We use a list of simple yes-no questions that publishers have to answer. These questions deal with the various content categories, in as many different ways as possible. This allows us to create a scale that puts the content in the right age category. Taking violence as an example, a publisher answers a variety of questions that deals with different degrees of violence (from mild, unrealistic, cartoonish violence to gross violence against defenceless characters). We regularly update and change details in this questionnaire to ensure it reflects the sort of games that we examine today. We will likely add the questionnaire to the public website (but it only exists in English to avoid things getting lost in translation), that should provide you with the detail that you are looking for.

- When I do an advanced search, selecting only the "In-game purchases" content descriptor, I get only 18 results. Some of them are recents games, but others are from 2015. Why I get only few results and mostly from Ubisoft's games? 

The descriptor was implemented in September 2018: as of then, publishers could indicate that their game includes in-game purchases. Because this happens fairly early in the preparation process to launch a video game, it can take up to a few months before a game with that descriptor is actually available in the shops. That is one part of the explanation why the number is still low (but you will see a gradual increase in the coming weeks and months). Another reason is that, to our own great surprise, less games than expected actually contain in-game purchases (and we made sure that we applied the broadest possible definition of in-game purchases). Obviously many triple-A titles have this, but on average – and these are still early figures, so not 100% reliable – only 1 in 4 games that use our classic rating system (this excludes Google Play games and apps, for example, where the ratio may be different) contains in-game purchases.

- How can a 2015 game can be rated with a content descriptor created in 2018?

Obviously, in-game purchases existed before we implemented the descriptor. For that reason, we adapted to our back-end system to enable publishers to add this descriptor to older games if there is a need for this: when they plan a re-issue, a special edition, or a bundle of older games for example. We do not have the resources to retroactively check to which of the 30.000+ games the descriptor applies, but at least it is now possible for publishers to update the information about older games. Some have already done this, others may choose not to do this (especially for older games that will not return to stores) or will do it at a later stage.