Tencent to limit play time of top-grossing game for children | Hacker News Reader

Tencent to limit play time of top-grossing game for children

reuters.com

27 pointsSirLJ13 comments

This is not the whole story. The backstory is actually http://variety.com/2017/biz/news/tencent-loses-14-billion-ho...

Basically, the Chinese government/media started to scrutinize tencent's games and found that it was 'poisoning' the young players' mind. Tencent briefly lost $14B right after the Chinese Government comments.

The article doesn't seem to be well researched or written.

For one, when a company's shares fall in value - the company's finances have little effect apart from increased cost of capital raised in future through equity.

The way the article is written makes it clear that it's talking about market capitalization (since the first sentence mentions the Hong Kong stock exchange).

When talking about public companies it is accepted practice to shorthand market cap movement as "gains" or "losses" and the way this is generally disambiguated from earnings is through a reference to the exchange or a particular earnings report.

> Chinese media and technology giant Tencent suffered a dramatic loss of $14 billion on the Hong Kong stock exchange

Should've been shares or shareholders of Tencent; public companies rarely hold significant stock of their own on the balance sheets in comparison to public float. It wasn't Tencent that suffered the loss but the shareholders.

Mentioning the stock exchange makes no clarification whatsoever, could've been a follow on offering that lost $14B due to investor concerns or a corporate debt/bond issuance that went awry.

No it isn't. Would love some citation on that.

Chinese games are already required to implement "anti-addiction systems" for people under the age of 18. In PC games rewards are removed after more than a certain number of hours of play.

It looks like mobile games had somehow escaped this, until now.

this is a fantastic sounding system that would (hopefully) discourage predatory game design, and perhaps force developers to focus more on creating engaging gameplay rather than manipulating players' addiction instincts.

I'm not sure those 2 things are cleanly separable

How's about we regulate / mandate that children are only allowed x minutes of game play per day across all devices.

This would be enforced at the device OS level.

Some categories of games would be excluded.

Bit of a nanny-state thing to do, so Australia would probably be the first to implement it.

I don't necessarily think this would be a good idea, but... Thoughts?

Korea already does this for their games as well. In a mmo game like Maplestory they also always show your real life gender (since a ID is required to register) and even have 18+ restricted areas within the game

How do they find out if a users name is a real name? And if his age is correct?

They probably ask for your ID number and look up those details from the government.

>top-grossing game by worldwide iOS + Google Play revenue

Does Google Play work in China?

It doesn't. If the article is to be believed it topped Google Play in spite of that. Tencent also has their own payment service which casts further doubt on that statement.

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