China restricts online gaming to 3 hours a week for minors
The Covid-19 Pandemic has taken the whole world by storm, restricting worldwide travel, plaguing business, and even delaying some of our most anticipated games. The public has turned to a number of recreational activities like gaming, which has been a way of entertaining ourselves during this time. Things are about change drastically in China, as a new restriction is looking to heavily cut down online gaming time for minors.
A Bloomberg report says that China is imposing its heaviest restriction yet in its efforts to curb the expansion of large tech companies. The restriction, aimed at minors (under 18 years old), will only allow these kids to enjoy one hour of gaming on Friday to Sunday and Holidays. That’s not all, there’s even a specific time to play, which is 8-9 PM. The previous restriction was 1.5 hours daily on most days back in 2019.
NetEase and Tencent, which are some of the world’s biggest tech and gaming companies, will surely be affected by this restriction and will be a blow to gaming spend from minors, which is already low as per Daniel Ahmad, Senior Analyst at Niko Partners.
Some key points in the report include:
- All online games should be linked to a state anti-addiction system, and companies can’t provide services to users without real-name registrations
- Regulators will ratchet up checks over how gaming firms carry out restrictions on things like playing time and in-game purchases
- Regulators will work with parents, schools and other members of the society to combat youth gaming addiction
Such a policy will be quite a pain to implement even for China, so it’ll be interesting to see how this all goes down in the next few months.
What do you think of this policy?