Filtering Games by Rating

Hi Marianne,

which rating are you referring to and which version of XG software are you using?

Ian

My guess would be they're referring to the age rating, which XG would not know about. XG (and UTM I assume) track applications in general but categorize them by "risk" or "waste" so probably treat all games the same.

To be honest, how would the firewall know what game is being played? Especially if all PS games go back to PS servers so there's no source/destination and probably no port/protocol differences to distinguish them. Of course, the PS knows the application -- in that sense it's like having endpoint software on the client: it knows which program is communicating, not just what port or target IP is being used.

So to answer the OP, there won't be anything built-in to a firewall to control specific games. However, some games may have recognizable parameters: a particular server or range of server IP addresses, particular ports being used, and so on. So if you could capture traffic from the game being started and played, you might be able to spot particular tell-tale signs. Or maybe not. If you can spot tell-tale signs, you can create rules in a firewall to stop or allow the traffic.

If you know the game device's IP address -- often the firewall will assign it an address -- you can set up schedules so that the device can only talk to the internet during certain hours. So that's like parental controls.

(It's possible that some consumer-grade firewalls do more to try to distinguish individual games and allow you to control them, based almost purely on ports. A commercial-grade firewall (like Sophos) won't bother with that.)

My guess would be they're referring to the age rating, which XG would not know about. XG (and UTM I assume) track applications in general but categorize them by "risk" or "waste" so probably treat all games the same.

To be honest, how would the firewall know what game is being played? Especially if all PS games go back to PS servers so there's no source/destination and probably no port/protocol differences to distinguish them. Of course, the PS knows the application -- in that sense it's like having endpoint software on the client: it knows which program is communicating, not just what port or target IP is being used.

So to answer the OP, there won't be anything built-in to a firewall to control specific games. However, some games may have recognizable parameters: a particular server or range of server IP addresses, particular ports being used, and so on. So if you could capture traffic from the game being started and played, you might be able to spot particular tell-tale signs. Or maybe not. If you can spot tell-tale signs, you can create rules in a firewall to stop or allow the traffic.

If you know the game device's IP address -- often the firewall will assign it an address -- you can set up schedules so that the device can only talk to the internet during certain hours. So that's like parental controls.

(It's possible that some consumer-grade firewalls do more to try to distinguish individual games and allow you to control them, based almost purely on ports. A commercial-grade firewall (like Sophos) won't bother with that.)