China now limits video games to just three hours per week for minors

China is taking increasingly drastic steps to curb video game addiction among its younger population, and the latest move may lead observers to question whether the country is on the verge of banning underage gaming entirely. .

Previously, the already strict rules for minors (generally classified as under 18 in China), allowed one and a half hours of video games per day. Now, the new rules count only 1 hour per day, and only Friday, Saturday and Sunday, for a grand total of three hours per week.

The app is usually tied to real name / identity accounts tracked by gaming companies who are required to adhere to these rules when operating in China, which means you can be kicked out of a game. after this time has expired and you will not be allowed to enter outside of these specific times. And they are very specific hours, only between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. on these three weekend days. That’s for around 110 million minors who play video games in China. Focused on a specific hour per day, it’s an open question whether this could create server lockups for certain games.

The movement is so restrictive that it is approaching the point where you have to ask yourself a lot of significant investments that these kids can even have in these games, limited to just 3 hours per week. Granted, much of the game in China is mobile, which often means shorter games, but trying to “progress” at this rate in most games, which are not set up for such a small amount of focused play, can be frustrating. It’s also easy to imagine that with such a short and specific window, you could easily run into issues in a game’s matches like, say, League of Legends being cut halfway, depending on the length of time. , which means that the effective play time would even be less than an hour if you spend 20 minutes on a game that just can’t seem to finish.

Of course, the Chinese government doesn’t care about that, it does care about disconnecting children from video games, which they see as a persistent problem in the country. Hardly any other region in the world has gambling restrictions close to this, and while many parents say the United States can complain that their children are addicted to one game or another, something tells me that ‘They wouldn’t like a government mandate limiting their children’s free time either.

Player spending among minors in China is low, but that’s because of the limits that are already in place there. But this will now bring it down even more. It seems unlikely that this will get less time-restrictive, and China appears to be on the verge of banning underage gambling entirely, given that we’ve gone from 10.5 hours a week to just three.

We’ll see how it plays out and how some of the most popular games in China can twist themselves more to try and adapt to these new rules.

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