cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3073672
In this whole article there are only two paragraphs that are not useless word salad:
The government now wants to set a cap on how much money each player can spend within a title, according to the draft.
The regulations also asked that game publishers operating abroad respect Chinese laws and culture and refrain from endangering national security, without elaborating. Tencent is the world’s largest gaming publisher, with investments in studios from Epic Games Inc. in the US to Supercell in Europe. The agency will take feedback on the proposed rules for a month, without saying when they take effect.
Bonus reddit gamer cope:
I can get behind prohibiting these sorts of mechanics. Don’t think they really add anything of substance. Though I would prefer that companies and the industry self-regulate rather than having the government step in, but that’s unlikely to happen.
Look at this idiot that believes in corporations regulating themselves. I bet he thinks children who believe in Santa (a very real phenomenon whom I once saw in a mall) are stupid.
This would actually kill most, if not all Chinese game developers if they for some reason decided to commit suicide and respect this law globally
Depending on what the cap is, 70-90% of a free game’s revenue comes from “whales”, the outlier large spenders
As the libs like to say, this one is actually destroying their own industries to save the minds of Western children
Honestly, it would do everyone a favor if the gacha industry imploded.
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I don’t think we need to defend the most egregious form of video game revenue for the sake of revolution.
I deleted comment cause didn’t want to get into this but I do feel gaming companies are overemphasized here because people here are gamers and terminally online
Like market reforms have resulted in infinitely worse things than gacha games. Poor conditions in factories, mines, competitive schooling system, etc.
Good point.
Nah they’d find a new monetisation model that’s less cancerous.
And that’s a good thing.
Free market would mean they’d be beat out by other companies that don’t follow the freemium model
The whales subsidize the game so ~95+% of the player base can play for free
Pretty much all the top PvP PC games are free nowadays with cosmetic transactions
https://newzoo.com/resources/rankings/top-20-pc-games
Contradictions popping up now with trying to enforce socialist values in a country of private corporations participating in global capitalist markets
No I disagree. There are plenty of games that don’t follow the freemium model that achieve critical success.
They will lose in the GaaS space. That doesn’t mean they will lose in gaming overall. Even then I’m not convinced they will lose in the GaaS space with a spending limit, they’ll lose WHALES in the GaaS space but that has absolutely no bearing on whether they would lose average players.
With that said, the games do not have to be “top pvp” games. Single player games have significantly more cultural impact anyway, nobody gives a fuck about the story in any pvp games which grossly limits their ability to be any form of soft-power.
If this kills the GaaS market the industry will just transition to a different type of game to produce that isn’t GaaS, which is a good thing because the GaaS market of games is widely regarded as shit even if everyone is playing them between the releases of the good impactful games.
What you say about whales is true. It’s possible that the law does not affect how Chinese publishers operate in the “free world” though. That would be very funny.
Idk, sounds like they expect them to follow these laws globally.
Yeah you are right. For some reason I interpreted that as a message for non-Chinese publishers for when they operate in China.
It wouldn’t make sense for them to “ask” foreign companies operating in China to “respect” Chinese laws and culture. The laws also apply to those entities
Ah, I hadn’t considered reading it that way. Yeah, I’m actually not sure.
I could see it going either way now that you mention it. Damaging national security could be harming China’s global image with predatory products from China or it could be harming the financial and mental well-being of Chinese people with predatory products brought into China from other countries.
I guess we’ll have to see, since China is an actual democracy we won’t know what the law will look like when finalized until the public has a chance to comment.
Edit: actually after reading GaveUp’s comment I’m back to my original comment, any company operating in China would obviously need to follow the law within China, this is almost certainly about ensuring that mihoyo doesn’t scuff up China’s image with their predatory gacha stuff.
Imagine gamers around the world using VPNs to connect to Genshin’s Chinese servers because they don’t have MTX anymore and were remade to make unlocking characters fun and interesting.