Will teen gaming clampdown deal a knockout to China’s esport

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Will teen gaming clampdown deal a knockout to China’s esports?



A steady lunchtime crowd of twentysomethings mill about the Tim Hortons and Tencent Esports Cafe, a newly opened venue to showcase professional video gaming in the heart of Shenzhen’s tech district of Nanshan.To get more latest entertainment news, you can visit shine news official website.

Grabbing coffees, doughnuts and sandwiches, a few curious visitors pose for photos with virtual images of pro gamers on a large screen, or watch replays of esports tournaments on another screen from the same padded chairs that gamers often use.China is the largest esports market, with over 400 million fans and viewers, according to the most recent numbers cited by state-run news outlet the People’s Daily. With numbers like that, placing bets on a venue like this seemed like a no-brainer several months ago.

Trouble is, while local and national governments had been supportive in the past of building up the games industry, competing to host tournaments and even allowing university courses in esports, new rules that took effect on September 1 have restricted anyone under 18 years old to gaming only three hours a week, or one hour per day at 8pm on Fridays through Sundays.

With state-run media and other government agencies describing video games as “spiritual opium”, the new restrictions appear set to deal both short- and long-term damage to the gaming industry in China, with those long-term impacts likely the most painful for professional esports.

This week, the Chinese government signaled how serious it is about enforcing the new rules after state-run news agency Xinhua reported that regulators had summoned gaming firms including giants Tencent Holdings and NetEase to discuss the new restrictions.Regulations have been in place since 2018 requiring real-name identification, and the number of hours teens played per day was limited to 1.5 a year later. But the latest rules are more strict and go much deeper in terms of potentially weaning teens off their interest in gaming.

“With real-name authentication a must, new players who want to try the games anonymously before deciding to be a regular player might be turned off from trying,” Eason Zhang, a games developer based in Shenzhen who has been involved in the field for over a decade, told Al Jazeera.

Those previous restrictions three years ago already pushed gaming titans like Tencent and NetEase to further expand abroad instead of mainly focusing on the Chinese market. That trend is expected to continue.

“It meant that a lot of game developers in China shifted their priorities to themselves, either developing games just for the domestic market, or to try to reach the global market industry, with localised titles or specialised titles that launch around the world first, and then come back into the mainland,” Daniel Ahmad, an analyst at Niko Partners in London, told Al Jazeera.Revenue hits from the latest restrictions are unlikely to dent profits for the biggest games companies, with only around 1 to 5 percent of revenue coming from the around 110 million teens playing online video games in China, Ahmad said. With around 97 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 24 engaging in games in some way, the short-term impacts are unlikely to be great.

Gaming is part of the culture, and China is the largest games market in the world,” he said. “This isn’t something that is suddenly disappearing overnight for minors, even though the limits are extremely harsh. It’s still part of the culture. Parents of minors today have grown up with gaming, so they’ll be more liberal minded and may be more open to letting their children use their accounts to play games.”

Online backlash among teens has been strong, with comments on social media network Weibo noting how unfair the policy is and questioning how teens will be able to “relax” now, and even whether it will affect their creativity.

Some jokingly brought up other recent top-down policy moves by the government such as the three-child policy, with one person posting on Weibo: “For all the adult gamers, don’t jeer at minors too hard now, because who knows if there will be a policy someday that requires you to prove that you have a spouse and at least three kids before being allowed to log into your games.”