- cross-posted to:
- games@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- games@lemmygrad.ml
cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3073672
In this whole article there are only two paragraphs that are not useless word salad:
The government now wants to set a cap on how much money each player can spend within a title, according to the draft.
The regulations also asked that game publishers operating abroad respect Chinese laws and culture and refrain from endangering national security, without elaborating. Tencent is the world’s largest gaming publisher, with investments in studios from Epic Games Inc. in the US to Supercell in Europe. The agency will take feedback on the proposed rules for a month, without saying when they take effect.
Bonus reddit gamer cope:
I can get behind prohibiting these sorts of mechanics. Don't think they really add anything of substance. Though I would prefer that companies and the industry self-regulate rather than having the government step in, but that's unlikely to happen.
Look at this idiot that believes in corporations regulating themselves. I bet he thinks children who believe in Santa (a very real phenomenon whom I once saw in a mall) are stupid.
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Hell yeah.
One of the most toxic thing about a lot of online games is the practically infinite amounts of money you can spend. When they restricted children's access to them a couple years ago, I hoped the next step would be looking at spending caps.
I wonder if this will end up creating a Chinese "flavor" to games. Like how people look at Korean MMOs and say "it'll be grindy as fuck", people might look at Chinese games and go "Oh it'll have good drop rates."
Also, it's been funny seeing libs react to this. I've seen a bunch of them say stuff like: "wow, the monstrous CCP finally does something right", lmao. "Monstrous" they say, while they actively shame people into voting for a guy who's supporting a live genocide. Propagandized clowns.
Incoming horde of western gamers angry that China doesn't enforce regulations in foreign markets for their companies.
Western gamers would prefer to bled dry by corporations rather then being subject to asiatic authoriarianism.
This is their perfect moment, it hits everything they have ever wanted:
- They directly benefit in clear and immediate fashion
- They can claim to be victims of government oppression
- They can be openly racist about it
Gacha paypigs crying loudly about how the CPC stopped them from financially ruining themselves by spending 5000 USD for a new waifu 5 times a year. How authoritarian.
Xi, please come for tcgs next, I want to build an mtg deck out of 4 booster packs because that's the max you can sell in a week, I'll import the Chinese ones if WotC refuses to follow Chinese regs in the "United States."
Common China W. Hopefully gacha game operators from China must comply with these laws even with global servers.
To be fair, that lib was saying 'in an ideal world people would be nice but they won't be so I can get behind this'. Which all things considered is what the actual liberal position should be. The one gamer who understands lootboxes exist due to unregulated self interest by large corporations.
The regulations also asked that game publishers operating abroad respect Chinese laws and culture and refrain from endangering national security, without elaborating.
My impression of this line is "we would like you to also follow these laws when publishing your games abroad and not to use 2 different monetisation models, one in china vs one in the west, in order to milk the anglos pockets because they have very poor regulators."
My guess here is that they're trying to rein in the gaming industry to extend Chinese soft-power. They want the monetisation models to be more popular and they want these models to be used by their companies globally. They want Chinese games to have less awful models than western games as a means of affecting gamer opinions of China.
It's a good idea. West will either ignore it and their soft power will grow, or the west will do something about the models in their own industries.
Gaming is the new hollywood imo. It should be the focus of soft power growth.
I agree. It would be really funny though if unequal exchange could be overturned solely through exporting gacha games though.
Century of Humiliation but it's just chinese people pointing and laughing at gullible westerners spending thousands for pngs of waifus.
To effectively weaponise the medium they need to move off of gacha games and into single player games that have a significantly larger cultural impact.
The gacha games have no cultural impact. The GaaS multiplayer pvp games like cod, overwatch and so on also have no cultural impact. They aren't influencing people's minds or opinions much if at all.
The games that do are the singleplayer immersive experiences, because the IMMERSION is the part that sucks people into being influenced by the story, environment, world, etc.
The biggest cultural impact of call of duty is in 12 year olds telling you they fucked your mom, and the biggest cultural impact of Overwatch is pornography.
The single player titles have all of the cultural influence, they are where minds get shaped.
This would actually kill most, if not all Chinese game developers if they for some reason decided to commit suicide and respect this law globally
Depending on what the cap is, 70-90% of a free game's revenue comes from "whales", the outlier large spenders
As the libs like to say, this one is actually destroying their own industries to save the minds of Western children
Honestly, it would do everyone a favor if the gacha industry imploded.
I don't think we need to defend the most egregious form of video game revenue for the sake of revolution.
I deleted comment cause didn't want to get into this but I do feel gaming companies are overemphasized here because people here are gamers and terminally online
Like market reforms have resulted in infinitely worse things than gacha games. Poor conditions in factories, mines, competitive schooling system, etc.
Nah they'd find a new monetisation model that's less cancerous.
And that's a good thing.
Free market would mean they'd be beat out by other companies that don't follow the freemium model
The whales subsidize the game so ~95+% of the player base can play for free
Pretty much all the top PvP PC games are free nowadays with cosmetic transactions
https://newzoo.com/resources/rankings/top-20-pc-games
Contradictions popping up now with trying to enforce socialist values in a country of private corporations participating in global capitalist markets
Free market would mean they'd be beat out by other companies that don't follow the freemium model
No I disagree. There are plenty of games that don't follow the freemium model that achieve critical success.
They will lose in the GaaS space. That doesn't mean they will lose in gaming overall. Even then I'm not convinced they will lose in the GaaS space with a spending limit, they'll lose WHALES in the GaaS space but that has absolutely no bearing on whether they would lose average players.
With that said, the games do not have to be "top pvp" games. Single player games have significantly more cultural impact anyway, nobody gives a fuck about the story in any pvp games which grossly limits their ability to be any form of soft-power.
If this kills the GaaS market the industry will just transition to a different type of game to produce that isn't GaaS, which is a good thing because the GaaS market of games is widely regarded as shit even if everyone is playing them between the releases of the good impactful games.
What you say about whales is true. It's possible that the law does not affect how Chinese publishers operate in the "free world" though. That would be very funny.
The regulations asked that game publishers operating abroad respect Chinese laws and culture and refrain from endangering national security, without elaborating.
Idk, sounds like they expect them to follow these laws globally.
Yeah you are right. For some reason I interpreted that as a message for non-Chinese publishers for when they operate in China.
It wouldn't make sense for them to "ask" foreign companies operating in China to "respect" Chinese laws and culture. The laws also apply to those entities
Ah, I hadn't considered reading it that way. Yeah, I'm actually not sure.
I could see it going either way now that you mention it. Damaging national security could be harming China's global image with predatory products from China or it could be harming the financial and mental well-being of Chinese people with predatory products brought into China from other countries.
I guess we'll have to see, since China is an actual democracy we won't know what the law will look like when finalized until the public has a chance to comment.
Edit: actually after reading GaveUp's comment I'm back to my original comment, any company operating in China would obviously need to follow the law within China, this is almost certainly about ensuring that mihoyo doesn't scuff up China's image with their predatory gacha stuff.
Imagine gamers around the world using VPNs to connect to Genshin's Chinese servers because they don't have MTX anymore and were remade to make unlocking characters fun and interesting.
What absolute loser is worried about "excessive" regulation of blatantly exploitative corporations?
