China battles addiction to gambling by imposing a curfew and daily time limit

China has put in place heavy restrictions on the practice of video games among young people.

Chinese minors must now respect a whole series of measures aimed at limiting their addiction to video games. Very strict regulations, as you will see.

Curfew and limited playing time

This is mandatory for anyone under the age of 18. For any online game, users will now have to enter their true identities (via a unique number) and their date of birth. No more anonymity. One can imagine that fraud, consisting of borrowing the identity number of an adult, will be legion.

Minors will be prohibited from playing online between 22:00 and 08:00. On weekdays, the playing time is even limited to only one and a half hours per day. On weekends, this threshold is raised to three hours of daily play. The young Chinese players will, therefore, have to find other occupations (study, hope the government).

A limit of money that can be spent per month is also fixed. or FIFA. Now, people under 16 can not buy more than 200 yuan (36 euros) of content per month, and people under 18 are restricted to 400 yuan (72 euros) monthly.

Read also: In China, Tencent limits minors to two hours of League Of Legends a day

The addiction to video games insight

China is trying to combat the dependence of young people on video games. In parallel with these measures, it also requires developers and publishers to remove aspects of their titles that can contribute to creating addiction. Gaming is notably accused of causing sleep disorders and eye problems, with consequences for both health and education.

These limitations imposed on young Chinese players may have an impact on the entire video game industry, which depends greatly on the Chinese market, as we saw with the case Blizzard - China - Hong Kong. This could lead to a significant decrease in revenue for the different actors.
As a reminder, the number 1 of the online game is the Chinese giant Tencent, owner of Riot Games ( League of Legends, TeamFight Tactics ), major shareholder (about 40%) of Epic Games (Fortnite, Epic Games Store) and minor participant (just under 5%) of Activision-Blizzard.

Source: The World