57
votes
China announces rules on video games - sparked panic among investors, wiping off nearly $80 billion in market value
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- Title
- China issues draft rules for online game management
- Published
- Dec 22 2023
- Word count
- 147 words
This should be extended to everyone imo. I hate this slot machine reward system.
It's not often that I say this, but I hope everyone copies China ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, this is good news for MMO players... China is a big market for Asian MMOs and this may bring benefits for western gamers as well.
Yeah this surprised me. I'm such a pessimist that I immediately was like "great, what did they do now?" when I saw the title. But this anti-gambling stance is really good.
I just saw a video from Daily Dose of Internet on YT where a guy in a motorized wheelchair thing was driving around a cylinder of slot machines, playing all four of them at once, over and over. Poor guy.
Yeah, I was absolutely scanning the article to find the poop.
Haha I know what you mean, I actually want a version of this in North America too. I think the way they're rolling it out is a shock to the market and to game developers. But a lot of the tactics are extremely predatory and just raising up gambling addicts from a young age.
It's a good thing, but that kind of sudden roll out is "bad for business", which relies on some fore planning and stability of future expectations. Then again businesses suck so tiny violin for them.
So eventually their developers will adapt and maybe other nations can actually learn from it. Maybe give companies a heads up but if they're smart they will use this as their heads up in ex-china markets.
It doesn't seem that the new rules are a done deal, nor are they effective immediately.
I don't know how these things work in China, but drastic changes such as these are usually preceded by a long deadline for the companies to adapt. Something like that should give companies at least 1 year.
They're profiting off addiction. Why give them a year to fix what they should have realized was wrong to begin with? Only the scum among game companies will be harmed by this.
I'm not really making a moral judgement here, that is just how these thinks usually work in my view.
Ah, I suppose that's true. I'm sure there would be a massive push back if that was done in just about any other country. In the USA, game companies would just sue the government to either repeal or for more time and likely win. Though, lobbyists and bribes would stop it from happening before it gets that far.
I agree. The gambling mechanics are awful and a lot of them are over-priced and predatory. I thought that DLC, when that was a new concept, was going to be pushing the worst of gaming (and game development) into the spotlight. Mtx loot boxes and pachinko mechanics in their present form are so much worse though.
I was worried when Valve hired an economist for their Steam Market. I wish I had read more of his weekly blog posts and that they were still accessible (I should check the Way Back Machine). And yes, that's the guy who became Greece's Finance Minister for 6 months.
So....how are they going to make money?
It still allows microtransactions, this just eliminates particularly scummy addiction mechanisms. You can still buy a tank for real money in War Thunder, but you don't get Silver when you log in several days in a row.
I like these changes. Nothing of value was lost.
Cracking down on only the most predatory monetization practices doesn't suddenly eliminate a companies ability to make money.
I mean, several of these companies operate on their current scale because of these practices, and can't afford to otherwise.
I think it's good for those companies to fail though, but there's a lot of games that just flat out won't work on a normal model. Freemium being the main offender.
I mean, it's definitely possible for freemium games to operate without many of these business practices -- they'll make less money, but it's not impossible to operate without them. Freemium games still existed before the big boom of lootboxes and they'll continue to exist after those have been regulated away.
good? fuck 'em if they can't make money without being scum
I did literally say as much
you did indeed I think I must have misread the first half of that sentence.
When I was a kid games made money by selling… the damn game. Period.
This was in every way superior to the current situation.
Ads, I'm guessing. Ugh...
All of these rules seem great. Hopefully the Chinese market is large enough that the effects spill over to the rest of us.
I think the impact will be negative on markets outside of China. Now you have all these game studios that want to maintain revenue: they're definitely going to incorporate outside of China, beef up on translation and localization personnel, and push their crap on non-Chinese audiences.
That will hurt Asian companies way more than Western companies.
I don't get it. They could just as easily ban culturally relevant companies from doing business there under any justification they wanted, Western or not, legitimate or not. It feels weird to do it in such a roundabout way. They don't really need support. It's an authoritarian regime.
I wonder though if it will hurt the Chinese economy. These games seem like an economic negative — they destroy productivity.