Measures include spending limits for online games and ban on rewarding players for logging in each day
China’s $45bn (£31.3bn) gaming industry has been dealt a blow by proposals to limit the time and money spent on the sector.
New rules including spending limits for online games, a ban on games from rewarding players for logging in every day and a ban on lucky draw features from being offered to minors were announced by regulators last week, sparking panic among investors.
Continue reading...Move marks shift in focus by Beijing as it tries to extend influence and keep sector in check
China is to take “golden shares” in two of its biggest tech companies, Alibaba and Tencent, as Beijing extends its influence on the country’s star tech firms and its most powerful and wealthy business people.
Beijing’s move marks a shift away from imposing hefty fines and sanctions in its two-year tech crackdown, which was launched after Alibaba founder, Jack Ma, criticised regulators,
Continue reading...Labor also faces criticism, but Albanese is gaining ground in news coverage on Chinese social media platform, research finds
The Coalition’s muscular position toward China is not going down well with Chinese-speaking voters, while Labor is facing criticism over its more generous approach to humanitarian immigration, an analysis of WeChat audience comments reveals.
The study of more than 3,000 political news stories and associated comments appearing on the Chinese social media platform, WeChat, has been undertaken by researchers at Monash and Deakin Universities over the past 11 months, including during the election campaign.
Continue reading...Chinese Communist party to crack down on almost weekly creation of billionaire company bosses
China’s president has vowed to “adjust excessive incomes” in a warning to the country’s super-rich that the state plans to redistribute wealth to tackle widening inequality.
According to reports in state media, Xi Jinping told officials at a meeting of the Chinese Communist party’s central financial and economic affairs commission on Tuesday, that the government should “regulate excessively high incomes and encourage high-income groups and enterprises to return more to society”.
Continue reading...China’s video game market is the world’s biggest. International developers want in on it – but its rules on what is acceptable are growing increasingly harsh. Is it worth the compromise?
In the years after it was founded in 1999, the Swedish video game company Paradox Interactive quietly built a reputation for developing some of the best, and most hardcore, strategy games on the market. “Deep, endless, complex, unyielding games,” is how Shams Jorjani, the company’s chief business development officer, describes Paradox’s offerings. Most of its biggest hits, such as the middle ages-themed Crusader Kings, or Sengoku, in which you play as a 16th-century Japanese noble, were loosely based on history.
But in 2016, Paradox decided to try something a little different. Its new game, Stellaris, was a work of sprawling science fiction, set 200 years in the future. In this virtual universe, players could explore richly detailed galaxies, command their own fusion-powered starship fleets and fight with extraterrestrials to expand their space empires. Gamers could choose to play as the human race, or one of many alien species. (My personal favourite dresses in a lavish golden cape and has a head like an otter’s, with soft reddish-brown fur, dark eyes and a black snout. Another type of alien is a sentient crystal that eats rocks.)
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