China now forbids minors from playing video games for more than an hour on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, Forbes reported Monday. Meaning anyone under 18 years old can only play for three hours a week.
These new rules are even tighter than the previous ones, which allowed minors to play video games for a total of 1.5 hours per day. All of this is part of an ongoing effort by China to curb video game addiction in minors, and video game companies like Tencent have to abide by them.
“Minors will be restricted at the account level using the existing real name registration and anti-addiction system,” Daniel Ahmad, a senior analyst at Niko Partners, said on Twitter. “For reference, there are around 110 million minors in China that play video games today.”
China's game regulator continues to implement targeted regulations aimed at curbing game addiction among minors
New policy states that minors can only play games for one hour on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays between 8pm to 9pm.
An extremely restrictive policy. pic.twitter.com/kkbh9PGsND
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) August 30, 2021
Ahmad also claims that roughly 2.6 percent of Tencent’s players are younger than 16 years old, so these rules likely won’t affect the actual gaming companies too much. Even though that’s still a lot of people under heavy restrictions.
Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.
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