China's State Press and Publication Administration announced today (12/22)Draft Measures for the Administration of Online Games, which contains more than 60 management measures, mainly focusing on avoiding excessive consumption and proposing many regulations for virtual transactions.
The new regulations prohibit online games from designing practices that offer additional rewards for daily logins, first-time deposits, or continuous deposits. Operators are also prohibited from deliberately hyping or driving up the prices of virtual items, or condoning the trading of virtual items at abnormally high prices. Furthermore, they must set caps on player deposits and issue warnings against irrational consumption.
Furthermore, for random draws within the game, the number of draws and the probability of winning must be reasonably designed to prevent excessive spending by players. Other regulations include prohibiting forced matches within the game, limiting the number of players allowed to join during technical testing to 2, and deleting player data after testing to ensure fairness in the game's official launch.
As for game live streaming content, the new regulations require that high-value rewards and support should not be used to prevent live streamers from engaging in extreme behavior in order to attract attention or stimulate more viewers to support with high-value rewards.
Currently, China's National Press and Publication Administration will solicit public opinions on the new regulations, but many people previously believed that the new regulations may have a counterproductive effect. At the same time, many people also believed that the new regulations will affect many game operations, resulting in a significant drop in the stock prices of Chinese game companies including Tencent and NetEase.
