No Cults, No Politics, No Ghouls: How China Censors the Video Game World

takyon writes:

No cults, no politics, no ghouls: how China censors the video game world

China is the world's largest market for the world's largest entertainment industry. Today, the number of Chinese gamers, about 740 million, is bigger than the entire populations of the US, Japan, Germany, France and the UK combined. Its domestic market is worth more than $45bn a year. Yet, for decades, China has had a stop-start relationship with the entire industry.

[...] Any foreign gaming companies looking to operate in China are legally obliged to have a local partner. For Chinese firms such as Tencent and NetEase, this was a goldmine. These tech giants, the Chinese equivalents of Facebook or Google, have regularly part-acquired foreign video game firms and then helped them access the lucrative Chinese gaming market. One of the first and biggest deals came in 2011 when Tencent made an agreement with the American developer Riot Games. Riot went all in, selling a 93% stake to Tencent for a reported $400m. Four years later, it sold the remaining equity and become a wholly owned subsidiary of Tencent.

[...] According to the [game designer], Riot managers had provided a PowerPoint presentation that she assumed Tencent had made for them, although she didn't know for sure. The slides explained some of the hurdles they would need to overcome. First, Chinese regulators are notoriously squeamish about gambling, strong violence and nudity - not only in games, but in TV and film, too. This is partly because the country does not have an age-rating system. Daniel Camilo, a Shenzhen-based specialist in publishing games in China, has said the government's mindset is that "if something isn't fit for one person, it isn't fit for anyone".

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