The freedom of players to indulge in their favorite leisure has yet to take a severe blow on the head in China, to the announcement of a new hardening of the game time allowed every week for players under 18 years old.
Imposed by the National Press and Publication Administration (NAAP), which regulates the consumption of video game and other forms of online media, these measures to reduce the addiction of young people already limited to 90 minutes the maximum daily play time of the Minors (3 hours a day during the holidays) Since 2019. According to the new measures announced on Monday, the juvenile play time will be limited to 1 hour (from 20h to 21h) on Friday, Saturday and Sunday as well as during public holidays . In other words, a maximum of 3 hours of weekly game for most weeks.
Unthinkable from us, this regulation is not a simple recommendation that it would be easy to get around as one can ignore a label PEGI 18 on the label of the last Call of Duty: in China, the minors are identified as such Thanks to the information of the accounts managed by the operators (Tencent, Netease or Bilibili) which are responsible for controlling the true identity of the users as part of the anti-addiction system of the government.
Number of parents said that the problem of adence at games in adolescents and children has seriously affected their learning and study capacity as well as their physical and mental health, even provoking a series of corporate problems, Justified the Naap again, as the South China Morning Post reports. These increasingly restrictive measures at the local level contribute to the multiplication of investments that giants like Tencent and Netease are doing with international companies, as was still talking about this morning with the possible recruitment of Toshihiri Nagoshi by Netease.
If it is estimated to be 110 million the number of minors who engage in China’s video game, the latest Tencent statistics indicate that players under the age of 16 represent only 2.6% of total spending in its games. The new government measures should not, in theory, not allocate the results of the giants of the industry, whose stock market values, however, do not quite hurt this kind of news.
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