China ban on online gaming

China just put a online gaming ban into effect. Kids under the age of 18 are no longer allowed to play online games during the school week and can play a maximum of 3 hours on weekends.

I know political talk is frowned upon here so I’ll skip my opinion on that side of things. I’m curious how that will impact us in the west though. Will more MMOS cater to the western audience if the Chinese money takes a cut because of this? Will more games either shutdown or get scrapped because of the loss in revenue?

Anyways here’s a link to the CNN article if anyone’s interested

China bans kids from playing online video games during the week - CNN

We have no rules against political speech as long as people keep it civil.

…best to let sleeping dogs stay that way Kel… you cannot have political discussions these days…the current and previous white house occupants are enough to instill pandemonium. It’s nice to be in a non political venue…

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I agree with your points, and would further add that I think political argument is useless at our age, as no minds will be changed. But Kelryth is 100% correct, and I don’t want to imply anything different.:

Political discussion is perfectly acceptable on OTG Forums/Discord…but all OTG rules regarding civility will be strictly enforced. :smiley:


I mean I get why they did this as there is a problem over there with online gaming addiction in kids and teens, but I think banning it like this is the wrong. Then again, that is chine, people complain about infringement of freedom and cancel culture in the States, but censorship and restriction on freedoms is far worse in China. @Darthaden you bring up some good ponderings and this is definitely gonna have lasting fallout in the online gaming industry.

I think China is just gonna end up with some really salty adults in their future when these kids grow up. :smirk:

people will find ways around it however because they are putting it on the private companies to help them police their policy, i think what we will see is that gaming companies in asia will just start leaving that market altogether.

Think of all the gold farmers who will be out of work …


Chinese gamers will unite to save the pixels. A hero will arise(let’s call him TRON) to thwart the seemingly all powerful CCP.

Without really getting ‘political’ about it, the reality is any governments effort to stamp out something that is culturally ubiquitous will be just as successful as Prohibition was or eliminating smoking. Sure there will be short term major changes(perhaps a decade long) - but in the long term

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Keep in mind this ban is on kids up to 18 years old. Think back to your youth. Did you ever break a rule? I almost never let the rules of my parents, school, church, or government stop me from being extremely stupid and doing extremely stupid things most of the time. I don’t believe it will work out as the media is making it out to be. I do not believe that it is anything but a political mechanism that may be more for those outside of China then inside. At first I considered that it might be a way to get distracted students back to focusing on school work so China can have a better educated populace but that goes against that type of government control. Then I thought maybe it was just another way to brow beat the youth to accepting tyrannical rules and control so thy will be less likely to protest in collage, but these ideas seem very ineffectual and more than incompetent, and most likely to have an opposite effect. I have no idea what differences in internet access/governmental control they have compared to us but I can not believe that there is any system of control like what they are saying to be able to do what they are saying. I have 3 teenage grandkids that can make an adult account on pretty much any service/app they want, which would bypass any rules for children. My kids often tried that also way back in the day, even though I caught and stopped most of it (hopefully). I believe most of the kids in China will only be slightly affected by this at best, and the real goal of these global announcements have some other incomprehensible (to me) political or commercial true purpose that will come out eventually.

Note that there were already limits to playing 90 minutes a day on week days and 3 hours on weekends. Also that it’s only for those under 18. I doubt this will have much of an effect on the market that will end up affecting us.