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Chinese regulator taking action against games addiction

Chinese regulator taking action against games addiction

Chinese content regulators are apparently looking to have greater scrutiny of games coming to market.

At the end of 2019, China's government announced that it was taking action to protect children from video games addiction - as reported and translated by Technode - saying that 12 departments will be tackling the rise of mental health issues among young people. Online games and live streaming are listed as targets for the regulators.

This follows the Chinese regulators stopping approval of video games for much of 2018, resulting in companies like Tencent using a whole load of money, with the PC games market dropping $300m in revenue as a result.

This was done under the guise of protecting children, with shortsightedness apparently being a concern to the China governments. There were 5,000 games held up by that backlog.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.