We have been seeing various measures being put in place by the Chinese government for some time now, and now the Asian giant seems to be tightening up its practices even more when it publicly announced that will start to actively enforce regulation which prohibits live broadcasts of unauthorized games.
And so it is that although countries have always required games to be officially licensed before they can be sold or broadcast in the country until now it was a little “lax” now enforce the latest ban.
According to Reuters, the country’s national radio and television administration delivered the report to the government last Friday, announcing that all Internet platforms have a “strict ban” on streaming any titles not approved by the government. Something superfluous given that the country has been paralyzing the approval of new titles since the middle of last year.
Daniel Ahmad, chief analyst at research firm Niko Partners, said that while unlicensed games could not be officially released in mainland China, many of them were promoted on live platforms such as Huya, DouYu and Bilibili. Although the real impact of this announcement on these companies is not known at this time, it would not be surprising to see the future actions of Tencent and other video game companies in the country.
In fact, one of the last unauthorized games was the successful Elden Ring, who, as Ahman himself assumed, «was a hit on Chinese live gaming platforms and reached a cumulative daily average of 17.1 million viewers, even though it was not licensed«.
This is not the first controversial measure taken by the country in relation to video games. Just a few months ago, we saw that, after a long wait and the harsh restrictions it had to comply with, China finally restricted access to Steam within the country again; in addition, other regulations were introduced last year to limit the amount of time people under the age of 18 can play video games to just three hours a week, which the government called “necessary measures to combat game addiction«.
