In recent hours, some of the biggest gaming corporations in China suffered from sizeable tumbles in their shares as the National Press and Publication Administration published a draft of guidelines aimed at clamping down on spending in online games. This action saw Tencent’s share value plummet by around 16%, with a loss of around $54 billion, while NetEase’s value collapsed by almost 30%.
These new guidelines are directed at the rampant issues concerning spending exorbitant amounts of money in online games that are bursting at the seams with microtransactions.
China’s New Gaming Rules
In Beijing, the new guidelines that were published were created to curb excess spending in online games. It’s no big secret that China is a huge contributor to the ‘free-to-play, pay-to-win’ market of games, which are typically costless to get into but offer microtransactions to all users that are far too accessible and addictive.
In the new guidelines, it was stressed that:
- Online games must set spending limits
- Online games must ban daily login rewards
- Players who stream their games must not be able to receive large tips
- Probability-based luck draws must not be offered
- Online game approvals must be processed by regulators within 60 days of publishing
As time goes on, the financial side of gaming is coming under increasing scrutiny. From the cost of games to unfair acquisitions, and from microtransactions to lootboxes, it seems there a new scandalous topic to discuss with each passing day, with many of these topics ultimately growing long in the tooth and hanging around for far too long.
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How?! Aren’t they trying to buy a publisher?
China can’t afford to let NetEase or Tencent fall the government better fund more money to them so they can stay open. Tencent needs to buy Epic Games and NetEase should buy CDProjekt
Tencent needs to buy Epic already secure the fees from Unreal Engine, Fortnite makes a ton, Rocket League, Fall Guys, and fix the EGS launcher no more free games maybe make more games exclusive to EGS.
This is going to hurt EA and Krafton Apex and Pubg do really well there
EA is about to get hit next Microsoft better buy them
They should ban Disney
Tencent should expand more finally buy out Spotify they’d make some bank there or better I think China would allow it buy Byte Dance.
Instead of losing it they should be spending it they could have spent less to buy Epic Games or Ubisoft last reports said they had $30 billion for a publisher acquisition yet they’ve done nothing since that report. Owning. Epic would make bank the only thing Ubisoft has is a library because the modern games are ass. I’d say pull those 2 off then try a game pass service with their titles exclusive same with Epic Game Store.
Free to play games in China with no Gatcha mechanics and no daily log in bonuses? This is going to make most F2P games worthless. Yeah, I can believe the drop in company value.
tencent hsouldn’t buy anything i think they should actually Die