Where Politics And Video Games Collide

While I'm against censorship in games and in favour of the ESRB and other similar rating boards doing their work, there *is* one valid concern: that R* apparently didn't *remove* content from the game, they just restricted access to it. Admittedly, the restricted access is better than including the content as an easter egg, to be activated somehow in-game, but as far as I know, there's no precedent, legal or otherwise, about whether "inaccessible" content on the disc should count towards the rating. It'd be one thing if people managed to insert their own AO-worthy content into a game via mods or proper hacking, but this is R*'s content. It wouldn't have been that hard for R* to modify their build process to disallow the offending code from being compiled and remove any offending images and other media from their build pipeline, so it's probably a bit of a stretch to assume they're totally innocent in this.

That said, the fact that it took hackers using illegally modified hardware to access the content is a pretty weak argument against R* and the game, and I would hope that it would be shot down. All I'm doing here is trying to highlight one fact that perhaps both sides are willing to ignore.