Gaming ban in China: Dark times for video game fans

Chinese citizens who like to enjoy one or the other PC or console game are currently looking down the tube. The Middle Kingdom has not allowed a single release of a new game since July of last year. Now thousands of national game developers have also had to react and unceremoniously shut down their operations.

14,000 companies facing ruin

However, the ban on the part of the government does not seem to be exclusively hurting Western companies. Chinese gaming companies have also had to close their doors. These are not a few individual cases, but a total of 14,000 small and medium-sized companies as the South China Morning Post now reports. The reason is an economic imbalance that has lasted for half a year now. Since then, not a single video game has been approved for distribution in China. That is untypical, since on the part of the Chinese policy usually monthly up to 100 plays for the free trade are released. But this is not a novelty in the Middle Kingdom. There was already a nine-month “approval pause” in 2018. As a result, the games industry in China has become an uncertain sector of the economy. So it is hardly surprising that in 2020 and 2021 combined, a total of 32,000 game developers had to shut down.

Widespread ban on online games

However, it is once again clear from the prolonged dry spell that China’s government wants to take action against consumer electronics corporations. This has long been the case not only for Western companies, but also for domestic ones. Online games in particular have been a thorn in the state’s side for quite some time. After all, these are the most promising titles for tech companies in terms of money. The government skilfully avoids the red rag of a blanket ban. Instead, the Chinese state has unceremoniously regulated the length of time each person is allowed to spend in online worlds on a daily basis.

For the past two years, the law has been in effect that people are only allowed to play online games for 90 minutes a day on normal working days. The only exception is on holidays. Here, people are allowed to play for twice as long. What may already sound like a harsh encroachment on civil liberties for our Western habits, China tightened up even further last fall. The government imposed an almost general ban on online games for all people who are not of age. They are now only allowed to gamble on weekends or holidays – but only for 60 minutes.

Does China threaten the global gaming industry?

If you consider that the Middle Kingdom has always been considered the world’s largest and most important market for video games, the scope of the bans becomes clear. But of course, the Chinese companies themselves are hit particularly hard. Only large corporations like Tencent can continue to exist on the market. Restructuring in the form of large waves of layoffs were nevertheless the result. Tencent, which celebrates worldwide success with the game League of Legends (LoL), can certainly compensate for this with the Western market. However, the future of the other remaining gaming companies is still uncertain.