China announced new laws to limit microtransactions, affecting major corporations like Tencent.
gamerant.com
These laws will ban rewards for spending money within a game for the first time, ban rewards for buying consecutive microtransactions, and ban rewards for daily log-ins.
I would've expected to see something like thus out of the EU rather than China, but at least somebody's making the first move against the predatory monetisation of apps
If only those "think of the children" politicians would do this instead of attempting to ban encryption.
You know you look really bad when the CCP shows you up!
There's no money in it
If China's plan is successful, other countries will follow suit.
PS: RIP my free intertwined fates in Gaming (Jiaming) Impact.
The Chinese government has started it‘s witch hunt against video games years ago and we have yet to see any of their draconic laws being enforced. It looks like they made them just so they can cherry pick and suppress whoever disagrees with them one way or another. This will be no exception. Gambling, prostitution and porn are all illegal in mainland China but it has always been a huge and open business in every part of the country.
Hi Tim
It's so destructive that even China doesn't like it
They probably love that it's hurting competing nations, though.
Things like this and the screen time laws are why I foresee China as a huge threat in the future. Every other country will be mindless zombies staring at their screens and stupid. Easy to take control of.
Tencent is a Chinese company
Yes and the new rules apply to the Chinese domestic market. Tencent is free to do harm western teens.
Well they can hardly pass laws controlling other jurisdictions
What makes you think I ever claimed otherwise. In fact I find your replies to me rather confusing.
Even Big China man no happy with your business Mr Wei-song, what should we do?
"Tell him to fuck himself"
Very rare China W.
Seriously seeing this come from China is
Mildly confusing, very unexpected but very much a cool move.
To add onto what the others have said, the CCP isn’t shy about enforcing restrictions on digital media domestically. For instance, TikTok in China (Douyin) is quite different from the international version with strictly-enforced time limits, content restrictions, etc.
China has always been against gaming it's the money they like.
If it was only money they wanted they would not do this. The limitations they are imposing will cut revenue to their biggest Game companies. I mean, the laws are not in effect and there was already a big crash on Netease and Tencent stock prices.
I think the CCP are just trying to do what they think is best for the welfare of their people.
China doing a better job regulating corporations than the west is nothing new.
Even this current one happened while Tencent was barely recovering from another regulation set last year. Kicking megacorps while they're down lol as they should.
Yeah im sad China is so far ahead of curbing predative monetization than my own country is, now.
But think about the CEO's freedom of abusing gambling addicts outside of a safe environment with virtually no regulation and that can be used by kids and teens!
I actually wouldn't have anything against gacha games if they all were marked as Adult-only, even the most dumbass parents would think twice about buying EA FC if it had the AO rating.
And not only AO, if it included the same required gambling-warnings other gambling system have to show every time they so much as mention their name.
Probably because CCP wants other countries' citizens to be addicted to games but not their own.
How else would they have 9-9-6 model if Chinese youth started going down the path of Japanese hikikomoris?
Well China doesn't like companies having power so this is a way to neuter them, especially in response to trying to limit online game consumption already.
Edit: Tencent is apparently the most profitable company in china right now so this is a direct attack at their profits most likely, not just China doing good
Edit2: This video goes into it a bit https://youtu.be/uieLEIVlQgc?si=mNiOlXPn9k7V6XX-
Very common W
Didn't China also recently introduce a limit of hours adolescents can game?
The world would be a better place without those transactions in my opinion. It might sound extreme but in my view this is the first step towards gambling addiction.
We as humanity are becoming really obsessed with everything digital instead of spending more time physically interacting with our peers. And unfortunately I am no exception.
Part of the problem is that there's no incentive for game companies to ensure that players are of an appropriate age and are gambling responsibly. It's a Pandora's box of capitalism in the same way fossil fuels, cigarettes, and big pharma are. Their customers have a demand for their product which is driven by a physiological/psychological/socioeconomic need, so they aren't subject to normal market mechanics.
Not recently, but yes.
Also, there's regulation to disclose the probability in getting rewards from opening "chests", which is actually gambling in nature.
In 2019, it was limited to 90 minutes on weekdays and not between the hours of 10 pm to 8 am.
In 2021, it was changed to 1 hour per day, only on Fridays, weekends, and public holidays.
If there's a behavior psychologist/researcher involved in the creation of a product, it's evil, simple as. Those gacha games absolutely use them.
I think you could go two ways with that. The psychologist could be under a mandate to give feedback to ensure your game is not going to be an addiction or they could be under a mandate to make it as addictive as possible. The latter is way more likely but I wouldn't totally rule out the value add of any psychologist to any game.
God, I hope they do that here. Would clear the appstores and other stores of 90% of shovelware overnight.
The S$20000 ($15000) Genshin Impact buying spree incident in Singapore had indirectly contributed to proposed legislation.
The what?
A lot of games are starting to display warnings to spend wisely when purchasing premium currency.
Which part of china is Singapore in?
There's so much addiction and gambling engineered into micro transactions, it's crazy. I'm glad China is regulating it.
Limiting micro transactions and banning predatory reward schemes in video games is genuinely a good thing. We need this to spread around the world.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Assuming it's a clock that's capable of being right twice a day, which isn't every clock.
A clock whizzing backwards at 60 RPM is right 86,400 times a day!
Y'all should temper down the sinophobia and just take a good thing for a good thing
Sinophobia? Bullshit. Being critical of the Chinese government is not being hateful towards its people. Find something better to be offended over.
China engages in this kind of “social democracy” all the time just like countries like Norway. But when Norway does it you don’t see people saying “rare Norway win”. I would call having a different standard for China vs a European country sinophobic.
If you’re a left progressive —as most people here on Lemmy seem to be— you probably agree with most of China’s economic policy.
China does sometimes engage in Chinese nationalism in a way that is worthy of criticism; but pretending they are worse than the U.S. in this regard is detached from reality.
The American ruling class has already decided they want war with China. They’re just trying to find a way to justify it to us. We as progressives shouldn’t make it easy for them to justify a war between 2 nuclear powers. Such a war could very well lead to the end of the human race.
Lmao
Care to elaborate? I assure you genocide and the end of humanity are no laughing matter.
The U.S. is currently supporting a genocide in Palestine/Israel. Before that we spent 2 decades in a war —based on a lie— in which the U.S. killed up to 1 million innocent Iraqis.
We are currently occupying many territories, to whom we deny equal rights/status as states including Guam and Puerto Rico.
Over the last century we constantly supported coups of democratically elected governments mostly in South and Central America. (See the Monroe doctrine).
Not to mention the soft imperialism of the IMF and the world bank.
China deserves criticism for their genocide of the Uyghur Muslims.
There may be further valid criticisms if they invade Taiwan. This could go either way depending on what the Taiwanese people ultimately decide. Right now most Taiwanese want to maintain the status quo. Which is strategic ambiguity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_Taiwanese_identity
Edit: I might also add the U.S. is currently undermining the Taiwanese people’s desire for strategic ambiguity. Putting its own geopolitical interests ahead of the desires and well-being of the Taiwanese people.
The U.S. record of nationalist imperialism is worse than China’s.
I'm not going to argue on who is worse, sorry, I'm not educated enough to convince someone. But yeah if you pin the middle east genocide to the us (which you should) it's bad, and I don't know how it compare to the Uyghur's genocide.
Just about that, isn't China doing way more shit on that one ? I know most Taiwanese want the status quo but there are mass campain from China to take Taiwan, and I've never heard of the opposite.
We're the good guys. It's for the greater good.
Triggered much?
Lol, in your imagination.
Lol where's the sinophobia? They didn't even mention China.
This post is about China, and they obviously mean China when saying "broken clock". What else would they be talking about??
But I disagree with it being sinophobia; criticism doesn't equal hate.
Calling china a broken clock is not sinophobia, it'd be sinophobia if it were saying the clock is broken by virtue of being chinese.
Same as if i were to shit on the US because it's a clown country or because it's run by white people.
EDIT: Bruh this ain't funny
Well done, I hope other countries will follow.
Do you all expect localization is tied to laws for china? I realy don't think so. Most games are split into global and asia/chinese versions anyway. Why should they remove these mechanics when it isn't necessary for the market they operate in?
The thought process is that for many games, the majority of their revenue comes from these mechanics and from China. The games themselves will need to change to get revenue flowing. And new games won't be made with this revenue source in general.
This is similar to how eu regulations can lead to global changes sometimes, China is a big enough market to affect things globally.
Yep, I'm not in the EU but thanks to the GDPR I still see the cookies thing on almost every website I go, sometimes these things have a good ripple effect.
Good. These kinds of transactions are exploitative and prey in the weaknesses of people with addictive personalities
The Chinese government actually does something right for once? My year is saved.
A broken is right sometimss
It'd be nice to see that come to rocket League. You know, the game where they removed crates because of the gambling, then removed trading to get kids to spend more money in the shop. So much better :/
I haven't had a look at the original text from China, but wondering how much they accounted for. Any of these rules could be easily circumvented if they didn't account for multiple scenarios.
"We don't have a reward for spending money for the first time, but everyone does have a digital coupon for $5 off of their first $10 purchase when they make an account."
"The players don't get any extras when they buy more of our digital currency, but every gacha pull does make the next 5 pulls a bit cheaper."
"No, we're not giving rewards for daily log-ins, but players can buy this bonus that adds a gift-giving NPC to the main town for 30 days, who will trade a small parcel of premium currency for a single gold coin once per day."
I guess we just shouldn't make any law about anything since people can go "well akshually" about it. /s
That's not what I'm saying. I was just hoping this law has teeth, because companies who are greedy for money will always try to circumvent whatever new restrictions are sent their way.
I'm thinking back to earlier policies set by China like the restrictions against showing undead/human remains in video games. World of Warcraft set up all these euphemistic workarounds to circumvent the law while realistically changing as little as possible, basically defeating the purpose of it.
China outlawed loot boxes, but then season passes and gatcha models were implemented in short order to continue exploiting consumers. If the law doesn't account for all sorts of scenarios that can be abused, it's just going to be a game of cat and mouse.
The only one I'm aware of is China's cultural distaste for showing bones, so Blizzard had to hide the skeletal structure in the Undead player class. In other words, it wasn't about the undead, it was only about showing bones.
What else did they do?
Well, it's China. How the commerce law affect you will depend heavily on who you know in the government and the party. If the new law is heavily pushed by someone important, they probably won't turn a blind eye for minor technicality. Someone up high probably got mad with their kids getting addicted with microtransactions and want to neuter it. Once that person lost interest or no longer in power, the enforcement will probably become much lenient.
This is China, their CEO will misteriously disappear if they try something so obvious.
How do Chinese judges react to transparent attempts to circumvent laws that have the same effect as just breaking the law? I wouldn't expect them to fall for the "I'm not touching you" defense.
China being based as always
"As always" is pretty strong, even in this context.
It's a bit of a hyperbole of course. But China is generally much better at regulating corporations like this.
That's what absolute power gets you. Zero checks and balance from the legislative, executive, and judicial system.