With Battlefield 3 portraying a fictional attack on Tehran, Iran have banned the sale of the popular shooter.
An unnamed deputy with the security and intelligence division of Iran’s police said in a statement to the Asr-e Ertebat weekly Iranian IT magazine:
All computer stores are prohibited from selling this illegal game.
The move won’t do much to EA’s sales as the publisher has no resellers in Iran, so only pirated copies and imports were available anyway. Some computer store owners said they had already declined to stock BF3, anticipating a ban. Iranian police overseeing public places allegedly “raided (some shops) and arrested owners for selling the game secretly” even before the ban became public, according to a shop owner who only went by Hamid.
The game also caused an online protest from a group of ‘Iranian youths’, with them saying in an online petition that has over 5,000 signatures:
We understand that the story of a videogame is hypothetical … (but) we believe the game is purposely released at a time when the US is pushing the international community into fearing Iran.
This is the first time a video game has received an official ban in the country.
[Via]
