"China is imposing a curfew on online gaming for minors, the government has announced.
Gamers under 18 will be banned from playing online between 22:00 and 08:00. They will also be restricted to 90 minutes of gaming on weekdays and three hours on weekends and holidays.
Its part of China’s latest move to curb video game addiction, which officials say is damaging to children’s health."
Oh lord. I’ve seen comments from some Chinese gamers on Steam that they actually hate Tencent - and now Tencent is going to assist the government in regulating their playtime? lol Hate Levels = It’s over 9000!
Well, can’t do much else as it’s a Chinese company. But it’s not going to do Blizzard and all the other gaming companies a lot of good if they’re counting on big sales for mobile and other games there.
Agreed. Blizzard will get massive lashback if they play ball with China on this. Going to be interesting to see what comes of it. I can just imagine all the Blizz execs cussing up a storm right now in their board meetings.
Must be they found out about da meta…
Don’t think they’ll have much choice since China already introduced a complete ban on gaming for a few months a while back. If the companies don’t play ball they’ll simply do that again.
Choice or not this is bad for Blizz. They literally just got out of the frying pan, momentarily, thanks to the D4 reveal - and now China tossed them right back into it with this. In Blizzards greedy little heart you know they don’t want to have to deal with this but they have to and they’ll do it because they want money.
It’s a classic case of rock meet hard place.
while these curfew for kids addicted to mmo (and wasting their parents’ credit cards for microtransactions) are a good thing for their society, these are the signs that prc government are trying to control everything their citizens do in their daily life.
its no wonder gamers from china are very accepting of poor quality games with recycled/reskinned contents/copyright infringement with bad customer service. since they’ll accept anything they got for entertainment.
thats why chinese market are alluring for mega companies.
Well, they’ve been doing that since Chairman Mao’s day so that’s nothing new.
Well, so far anything can come out of this. 
let’s not forget that china has literal concentration camps today.
So this gaming curfew seems mild at best.
RIP Chinese dota dominance.
if by chinese dota dominance you mean farmville…then yes. i agree 
i’m wondering, does prc people (youth & adults) gets addicted to things more easily or are they more resistant to addiction due to the almost total control of the government over their daily lives?
maybe the children are much more susceptible to addiction, since they haven’t learned much about the government’s restrictions until they become adults.
I think it’s difficult to generalize such things. Besides, they are so many unknown variables at play in china that it’s probably impossible to limit the risk of addiction to just the goverment.
Ooooh this old man here isn’t updated
I guess it’s all the same all over the world. It’s just that there are a billion of them. China’s huge but its population is mostly focused in the big cities, meaning the population density is also big. You’ll see more kids playing in the neighborhood compared to the other countries.
Someone tell chinese gamers that there is something called “single player games”.
i once read an article that pubg developer disable free for all/deathmatch modes for chinese version because those modes does not represent the spirit of community working together for greater goal that’s prevalent in chinese culture.
edit: i’ve found the article:https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-tencent-videogames/tencent-to-bring-worlds-hottest-video-game-to-china-promises-socialist-values-idUSKBN1DM192
yeah, tencent and china does not like single player games. doesn’t bring much profit for the nation.
Maybe not a bad thing for the PC gaming world which is getting totally destroyed by this new trend of the miraids of mindless and futile “Mobile Games” and console ports.
Kids have phones and will get hooked into this rubbish.
Give kids a PC and open up games like Grim Dawn for them.
Not saying that this is also not addictive, but at least the kid needs to sit down at his workstation to play games as opposed to playing ANYWHERE on his dumb ass smart phone.