China Sets Strict Limits on Gaming for Minors
The government of China has recently announced new limitations on playtime amongst the nation’s youth, stipulating that those under the age of 18 may only play video games on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, between the hours of 8pm and 9pm in local time. This move is a further tightening of existing regulations, which generally only cover online gaming as offline activities are much more difficult to monitor and enforce. The CCP has routinely described gaming as a “spiritual opiate” and believes the nation’s youth are addicted to video games to the point of being distracted from “school and family duties”.
While these regulations may seem ridiculous, they are something of the norm in countries like China, whose totalitarian society disregards the rights of individuals (and groups) since all activity must be subsumed to fit the aims of the state. Many of these measures involve controlling the media people consume and how they consume it so that hyper-patriotic norms may be enforced at all times. In addition, to ensure compliance, all games must log in using they real names, emails, and phone numbers so that the government can track their online activity and enforce the time limits, among other regulations. China is a blueprint for the type of extremist conservative spy-state that many worry the US is slowly turning into, with online activity and interpersonal communication heavily watched to ensure that it is both legal as well in line with what the CCP views as proper patriotic behavior.
This has broader repercussions for the global gaming industry as several developers such as Riot Games and Supercell are entirely or majority owned by the Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent. Epic Games is also 40% owned by Tencent and has a large customer base in the nation. Tencent also has small investments (5%) in Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft, in addition to being a major developer within China. Suffice it to say that gaming is a major business in China, and many developers and publishers will continue to be locked out of potential revenue so long as these restrictions remain in place. These new regulations also come along as part of a larger crackdown by the CCP on, well, everything really. Large homegrown tech giants like Tencent and Alibaba among others have faced mounting financial regulation and scrutiny designed to slow down or even overturn their meteoric revenue growth, which the CCP has deemed to be too fast for their liking.
China doing damage to its own businesses may benefit foreign competitors in the long run, their profound anti-gaming stance hurts just about everyone, except maybe the parents who now can get their kids to do more chores.
