After criticism from China, Tencent says it will limit playing time on flagship Honor of Kings for under 18s to one hour per day and not between 10PM and 8AM
with new boring title “Online Gaming Grows Into Industry Worth Hundreds of Billions of Yuan”. Scraps harsh words games are “opium of the mind”, “electronic drugs”. https://www.jjckb.cn/... https://twitter.com/...
Honor of Kings' youngest players lose nearly all weekday access — one hour per day, nothing between 10PM and 8AM — directly shrinking engagement on Tencent's top-grossing title.
Tencent is pre-empting regulators by self-imposing limits tighter than the 2019 national standard, absorbing the revenue hit before it is mandated.
Second-order effects
Rivals like NetEase face pressure to match Tencent's restrictions or risk being singled out in the next round of state criticism, compressing minor-driven monetization across the sector.
The escalation did not stop at company pledges: weeks later, state media set a hard national cap of three hours most weeks for minors, and sources report regulators began slowing approvals for all new online games in a meeting with Tencent and NetEase.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, Chinese gaming becomes a regulatorily rationed category — access set by the state, new titles gated by slow approvals — pushing companies toward adult-oriented content and overseas markets.
Beijing's child-protection playbook is extending beyond gaming into adjacent products: draft AI rules propose similar time limits and parental consent for children's AI use.
The trend:China is moving gaming oversight from company self-restriction toward direct state control of minors' playtime and new-title approvals, a template now spreading into other consumer tech like AI.
Journal tied to state media @XHNews slammed online gaming as “opium” for kids & singled out @TencentGlobal for game “Honor of Kings”, sparking share sell-off & talk industry could be next #China target. Report deleted w/i hours. Beijing appears sensitive not to stoke uncertainty.…
But wait it's back! #China state media report criticizing video games returns online— with new boring title “Online Gaming Grows Into Industry Worth Hundreds of Billions of Yuan”. Scraps harsh words games are “opium of the mind”, “electronic drugs”. https://www.jjckb.cn/... https…
Launched in 2017, Honour of Kings was the Shenzhen giant's flagship game. Last year, it went on to become the first game in the world on any platform to average more than 100 million users a day - the equivalent of about the entire population of the UK and Canada combined. 4/
Last year, Honour of Kings raked in US$2.6 billion in revenue from in-app purchases, making it the world's most profitable game, according to estimates from app tracking firm Sensor Tower in December. This year, the game's monthly revenue continues to trend upwards. 5/
This marks a first for the world's second-largest economy and the top video gaming market. The new rule bans players under the age of 12 from topping up in the game. It also limits them to playing only 1 hour a day on most days and 2 hours a day on statutory holidays. 2/
This comes after a story published by the state-run Economic Information Daily on Tuesday, in which gaming was described as “spiritual opium”, wiped off billions of value in stocks. The article Tencent, the world's largest gaming company by revenue, as a source of the problem. 3/
Along with its other hits such as Call of Duty Mobile, the developer of Honor of Kings, TiMi Studios, had contributed a revenue of US$10 billion to Tencent. In March, Tencent reported its overall online game revenues for 2020 had reached 156.1 billion yuan ($23.79 billion). 6/
Latest on Tencent: The World's Most Popular Game Bans Children From Spending Amid Regulatory Storm Tencent's flagship game Honor of Kings, played by more than 100 million people daily, has moved to ban players under the age of 12 from spending. 1/ https://www.scmp.com/...
So it turns out some people in Chinese officialdom aren't huge fans of the societal impact of computer gaming (though on second thought, maybe that “opium for the mind” language was a bit much). @keping @QiZHAI https://www.wsj.com/...