China has announced that children under the age of 18 are forbidden from playing online games for more than three hours a week.
The country considers this decision a social intervention that it said was needed to stop a growing addiction to what it once described as “spiritual opium”.
Platforms like TenCent, which offer online games, can now only offer gaming to children between the hours of 8-9 pm on Fridays, weekends and public holidays.
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This reduction is significant compared to the previous rule which allowed the minors a maximum of 1.5 hours per day for online gaming.
Earlier this month, Tencent was forced to reduce the amount of time minors could play their wildly popular mobile game, ‘Honor of Kings’ to just one hour on weeknights and two hours during the weekend.
The new restriction will most likely impact the share price of the affected companies.
Besides the time limit for gaming, Chinese authorities want games to be connected to some kind of anti-addiction system, companies keeping (real) name data for all users, more reporting on the use of in-game transactions, and more regulatory scrutiny generally.
Following the news, Tencent has issued a statement.
“Tencent expressed its strong support and will make every effort to implement the relevant requirements of the Notice as soon as possible,” the company said.
It is still unclear how much real-world impact the new rule will have since Tencent disclosed that minors make up a very small percentage of its overall business.