China is limiting online gaming time for minors to just 3 hours a week as part of the country’s measures to curb gaming addiction.
China is further limiting gaming time for minors in a bid to tackle the growing gaming addiction in the country’s youth. Beijing has announced that from September 1, minors will only be allowed to game on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, from 8pm to 9pm. This means that Chinese game companies are now legally required to limit the number of hours a minor can spend online in a game.
The government introduced real name verification in September last year in an attempt to regulate the amount of time children spend gaming online. Now, it seems that it is about to take things a step further and start requiring that games actively limit the duration a minor can spend online even more than they already have.
Previously, the rules limited minors to no more than 90 minutes of playtime a day, three hours on statutory holidays. Now, with these new rules, minors will only be able to game for a grand total of 3 hours per week. There have been cases of children attempting to get around the ID verification by impersonating an adult, but for the large part, these measures seem to be effective at cracking down on gaming addiction amongst young people.
It is also worth noting that these new regulations only seem to apply to China-based online games – there has been no mention of offline or foreign games at the present moment, though that may change in the future. While foreign companies may not face legal consequences in China, it does have a reputation for removing ‘unapproved’ games from gaming sites and various app stores.