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The Chinese gaming industry has been the subject of much news in recent weeks, as the government rushes to approve a large backlog of securities in the world's largest video game market.
Last Friday, the State Administration of Press and Publications of the country, the brand new authority of the game born of a reshuffle of several months last year that had led to a breakdown of electricity, has enshrined a new set of guidelines for the publication that should others be worthwhile.
On April 22, China finally resumed the approval process to allow new games for monetization. Licenses were reinstated in December, but Reuters announced in February that the government had stopped accepting new bids due to an increasing number of applications.
The bad news: the number of games allowed on the market each year will be limited and some types of games will no longer be eligible. The mahjong and poker games are removed from the list of approvals as a result of a crackdown by the government over fears that these titles could channel games of chance. These digital forms of traditional entertainment are immensely popular for studios because they are relatively inexpensive to manufacture and bear lucrative profits. According to video game researcher Niko Partners, 37% of the 8,561 games approved in 2017 were poker and mahjong titles.
Although the new rule eliminates hundreds of small, gender-focused developers, it may have a limited impact on entrenched players, as the restriction applies only to new candidates.
"This will not affect us much because we are ahead of the market and have accumulated a large collection of licenses," TechCrunch told a marketing executive of one of the largest online poker publishers and mahjong games in China.
China will also cease approving some games inspired by its imperial past, including "gongdou", which translates directly into the harem scheming, as well as the "gandou", the official word for the official competition of the palace. Life inside the palaces has inspired successful TV series, such as Story of Yanxi Palace, an internal production of the Chinese company Netflix. iQiyi equivalent . But these plots also touch the nerves of Chinese officials who worry about "obscene content and the risk of political metaphors," suggested Daniel Ahmad, Senior Analyst at Nikos Partners, TechCrunch.
Screenshots of Xi Fei Zhuan, a mobile game that allows users to play the role of harems to win the love of the emperor. Image Source: Superjoy Interactive Games
Games containing images of corpses and blood will also be rejected. The developers have previously changed the blood color to green to circumvent the restrictions, but the new guidelines have effectively excluded any blood color variation.
"Chinese game developers are used to arbitrary regulations. They are quickly designing methods to circumvent the requirements, "TechCrunch, an independent video game developer based in Guangzhou, said.
This will only work for companies with sufficient capacity and development resources to counter the new policies. For example, Tencent quickly implemented an anti-dependency system for underage users before this practice became an industry-wide standard.
"Many small publishers will have more difficulties with this new set of regulations, which will require them to spend more time and money to make sure the games comply with the code," Ahmad suggested. "We have already found that many small publishers have been unable to survive the temporary freezing of gaming license approval and we expect further consolidation of the market this year."
Over the past year, China has targeted the video game industry because of concerns about minors' reliance on gambling and illegal content, such as those that promote violence or deviate from gambling. ideology of government. In order to enforce the growing list of requirements, an online games ethics committee was established in December under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party's advertising department to help the new organization gaming regulations to review securities bids.
More than 1,000 games have been approved since China put an end to the freeze in December, although Tencent, the main player in the market, still has not obtained the coveted license needed to monetize its popular mobile title. , BattleUnknown's Battlegrounds.
The uncertain waters of the gaming industry have erased billions of dollars from the giant's market capitalization and spurred it to take the pulse in segments other than gaming, such as cloud computing and technologies financial. NetEase, the second largest gaming market in China, has responded by reducing its workforce to reduce costs.
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