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China to Curb Excessive Online Games Spending in New Tightening

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3073672

In this whole article there are only two paragraphs that are not useless word salad:

The government now wants to set a cap on how much money each player can spend within a title, according to the draft.

The regulations also asked that game publishers operating abroad respect Chinese laws and culture and refrain from endangering national security, without elaborating. Tencent is the world’s largest gaming publisher, with investments in studios from Epic Games Inc. in the US to Supercell in Europe. The agency will take feedback on the proposed rules for a month, without saying when they take effect.

Bonus reddit gamer cope:

I can get behind prohibiting these sorts of mechanics. Don't think they really add anything of substance. Though I would prefer that companies and the industry self-regulate rather than having the government step in, but that's unlikely to happen.

Look at this idiot that believes in corporations regulating themselves. I bet he thinks children who believe in Santa (a very real phenomenon whom I once saw in a mall) are stupid.

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41 comments

  • This would actually kill most, if not all Chinese game developers if they for some reason decided to commit suicide and respect this law globally

    Depending on what the cap is, 70-90% of a free game's revenue comes from "whales", the outlier large spenders

    As the libs like to say, this one is actually destroying their own industries to save the minds of Western children

    • Honestly, it would do everyone a favor if the gacha industry imploded.

    • Nah they'd find a new monetisation model that's less cancerous.

      And that's a good thing.

      • Free market would mean they'd be beat out by other companies that don't follow the freemium model

        The whales subsidize the game so ~95+% of the player base can play for free

        Pretty much all the top PvP PC games are free nowadays with cosmetic transactions

        https://newzoo.com/resources/rankings/top-20-pc-games

        Contradictions popping up now with trying to enforce socialist values in a country of private corporations participating in global capitalist markets

        • Free market would mean they'd be beat out by other companies that don't follow the freemium model

          No I disagree. There are plenty of games that don't follow the freemium model that achieve critical success.

          They will lose in the GaaS space. That doesn't mean they will lose in gaming overall. Even then I'm not convinced they will lose in the GaaS space with a spending limit, they'll lose WHALES in the GaaS space but that has absolutely no bearing on whether they would lose average players.

          With that said, the games do not have to be "top pvp" games. Single player games have significantly more cultural impact anyway, nobody gives a fuck about the story in any pvp games which grossly limits their ability to be any form of soft-power.

          If this kills the GaaS market the industry will just transition to a different type of game to produce that isn't GaaS, which is a good thing because the GaaS market of games is widely regarded as shit even if everyone is playing them between the releases of the good impactful games.

    • What you say about whales is true. It's possible that the law does not affect how Chinese publishers operate in the "free world" though. That would be very funny.

41 comments