China had planned to make strict rules about video games, but they changed their mind and removed the new laws from the regulator’s website.
The NPPA wanted to make rules to stop people from spending too much money and time on gaming.
However, the draft of the rules was not on the NPPA website as of Tuesday morning.
The time for people to share their opinions on the rules had ended on Monday.
They will have less things to buy in the game and they will try to stop people from playing too much.
Some people did not like the idea of giving rewards for logging in every day, and they also did not like the idea of a warning message popping up to tell players if they were acting in a way that didn’t make sense.
The prices of Chinese gaming company stocks went up on Tuesday after a surprising change in direction. This includes the biggest gaming company Tencent Holdings and its rival NetEase.
The value of the two companies dropped a lot, almost $80 billion, after the new rules were suggested in December.
Back then, experts thought that smaller or mid-sized game makers would suffer the most, not the big companies.
A few days later, the NPPA seemed to change its mind about some of the ideas because the market didn’t like the news. After that, share prices went up a little.
Ivan Su, a senior analyst at Morningstar, says that while the industry was somewhat reassured by the move, there is still a lot of uncertainty.
“I believe this feeling will continue for a while, unless the government changes its words dramatically or creates very supportive policies,” he said.
“We don’t know when it will happen. It could be next week, in a few months, or a few years from now. ” “That’s the biggest unknown. ”
But Su believes that if there is new law, it will be made less strong so it won’t affect gaming companies very much.
The not knowing what will happen in the future might make the Chinese gaming industry change.
In 2021, China made a big effort to stop kids from playing games too much by only allowing them to play for one hour on certain days.
That year, the government didn’t give out any new gaming licences for eight months.
Mr Su says that because of this, many Chinese developers have started making more games from other countries.
NetEase and Tencent bought or put money into companies in France, Japan, and the United States.
Because the rules in China are not clear right now, the large developers might consider expanding to other countries.