The Chinese government recently made a rule for kids who are under the age of 18. They are prohibited from playing any type of online gaming during the week and can only play three hours on the weekend, which is one hour per day from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. 

It is also allowed to be the same on any of China’s public holidays.

According to The Verge, the government is doing this “in response to the growing concern over gaming addiction and a broader crackdown on China’s tech giants.” And according to the website Bloomberg.com, “some of the key points in the new rules include that all online games should be linked to an anti-state addiction system, and companies can’t provide services to users without real-name registration.” 

This would make it harder for the gaming companies that reside in China to make any type of revenue due to the fact that a decent amount of people that pay for the game are around the age of 15 and up. As said in the Bloomberg article, “Tencent and other companies in China had said that children account for only a fraction of their business, especially after recent restrictions.” 

This would really impact the Chinese gaming companies as they would lose a decent portion of money through the online purchases. They also have to put their real names for the companies so that they can follow the rules correctly and not violate any of them. They are also monitored on how much they could spend on online gaming, which would hurt the Chinese companies’ profit. 

The restrictions were changed from China’s original rule which was 1.5 hours on most days of the week. 

Another way that they are dealing with online gaming is that they are checking the gaming firms that they are restricting the number of times children can play and are able to spend on it. This is further explained in the Bloomberg article: “Regulators will ratchet up checks to see how companies carry out the restrictions over things like game time and any in-game purchases. This would make it harder for any of the gaming companies to try and get out of doing any of the rules. This rule in the future would make it harder not just for people that play games in China but the gaming companies as well.”