The China country’s leadership goes further: we might have never seen any country outright ban live streaming for people under a certain age.

The South China Morning Post reports that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tightens its grip from the gadgets’ perspective. Live streaming service operators are banned from allowing anyone under 16 from registering to stream online. It’s another move amongst several new restrictions; all aimed to improve childhood development.

The State Council said that online services, from games to social networks, should limit how much time and money children can spend online. The Council will be doing more in classifying and reviewing the content in games and protecting children’s privacy and personal information, which is why it’s working on an electronic ID system to supervise minors’ playtime in games.

In the past month, we kept track of all the new regulations that came into play. About a month ago, the CCP announced that children would only be allowed to play three hours of games a week (one hour each on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and state holidays). Then, they announced a slowing down of the regulatory approvals for new games. A week ago, they revealed a new website allowing anyone to report any games or publishers not complying with requirements that users register under their real names, that minors’ playtime is limited, and that there are limits to prevent children from spending too much on in-game purchases. Don’t forget that Tencent implements facial recognition into its mobile games…

We have never seen such an authoritarian approach in the gaming industry before. The CCP is now a step away from outright banned games altogether, which might severely hit the two tech giants, Tencent and NetEase (who already got informed that they shouldn’t have a profit-oriented mindset…), which explains why they bought themselves into the Western industry.

Source: Gamesindustry