Chinese Communist Party to “slow” regulatory approvals of new videogames

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - ...According to a source and not an official declaration.

Remember how KoopaTV dedicated several articles in August to China, and it all ended with their new policy of three hours of online gaming for people under 18 per week? Well, that's not over. September means there's new opportunities for China to get into the news!

While initial reports erroneously said that China was suspending all new approvals for new videogames altogether for an indefinite amount of time, an update at the South China Morning Post published about six hours later clarified that it's not a total suspension, but just a slow-down. Still indefinite. Now, this is “according to people with knowledge of the matter” so it's not to be taken with 100% certainty (just because it's a story about the world's villains doing something bad doesn't actually make it true—there is a whole, VERY fascinating Wikipedia page about how this sort of sensationalist media coverage regularly happens to North Korea). However, this is the sort of thing that we'll be able to figure out in retrospect even if the Chinese Communist Party won't go out and say it directly.

Chinese gaming companies NetEase and Tencent were reportedly instructed in a private meeting with regulators to enforce the new limits, stop making the games inherently addictive and monetarily exploitative, and to make sure that Western values like “‘worshipping money’ and ‘gay love’” (as the article put it) were not to be in games played by Chinese people.

I guess the communists believe that more game choices will only exacerbate the problem of game addiction? Game approval affects games developed both domestically and from foreigners. Foreign games are already rarely allowed in (with some rare exceptions like Ring Fit Adventure). Domestic games are treated much more leniently... though perhaps not anymore. This will surely drive Chinese companies to push more of their crap out to American audiences, like Pokémon UNITE. The Chinese Communist Party cares if the Chinese are victimised by predatory games, but they're more than happy for other countries’ kids to be damaged.

That's the basic logic of how America has situations where Tucker Carlson, whose takes I usually respect, is praising the Chinese Communist Party for restricting access to online games and thinks maybe America's government should do the same thing when they're not busy mandating vaccinations.

To answer Tucker Carlson's question about the last time anyone has heard American politicians talking about videogames as a problem, I believe the answer to that was when President Donald John Trump was misdirecting people about how commonplace gruesome videogames are in press conferences about mass shooting incidents. He was more upset about some games’ violent contents than their addictive nature, however.

I can kind of see—temporarily ignoring how conservatives are supposed to feel about the role of government—the appeal of a nationalist's view of limiting games. I did just write that (Chinese) foreign game companies are trying to harm American children. However, when you look at American game companies, it's clear that those are possibly as bad. Just look how anti-American American game companies are becoming, making CEOs step down due to having personal, traditionally American beliefs. (At least some companies, like out of Japan, aren't doing that.)

But I don't think the proper answer to that problem is the government creating privacy-invading regulation systems to spy on what your children play. (And probably throw the parents into a slave labour camp if something bad happens.) In my experiences playing online games, there are a lot of messed up people playing them. People with really bad family histories. They aren't messed up because they're entertaining themselves, playing something to escape from their real lives. ...It's the fact their real lives are messed up to begin with due to whatever sorts of problems (maybe their parents are abusive or poor... maybe they don't have parents...) that they turn to those games for companionship and fun. Restricting access to any online game isn't something to emulate in free societies.

It's also not something that's right to do in non-free societies, which is why the best thing that can happen to the Chinese is not for Americans to emulate them, but it's for the Chinese Communist Party to be overthrown and lose its power.


Ludwig hates the Chinese Communist Party, and he hates entities that suck up to the Chinese Communist Party as well. That includes foreign corporations that wish to gain access to the supposedly profitable Chinese market and will willingly become communist pawns for that access. Hopefully those companies are re-evaluating their poor decisions in the face of China's increasingly restrictive regulations... or maybe those companies will become even worse to fulfill them. What do you think?


Along with Tucker Carlson, Chinese parents in China also really like what their government is doing to control their kids.
Since Chinese companies are having their proits restricted in their own country, they're quickly acquiring game studios from other countries to diversify.