The first week of August 2021, a Chinese news-ish publication called The Economic Information Daily published an article in which it mentioned an online multiplayer video game called Honor of Kings, saying that children were playing this and similar games and becoming addicted, and it was ruining them as people. The article calling such games, quote, spiritual opium, end quote, before ending the piece with a call

for more regulation on the video game industry within China to curb this issue.

I say the Economic Information Daily is a news-ish publication because it's one of the many

local news outlets that is affiliated with Shin Hua, which is China's official Communist

Party-run news agency, and the largest, and by virtue of that government affiliation, the most influential news agency

in the country. This criticism, then, coming from this news affiliate, was taken very seriously

by Tencent, the staggeringly large Chinese tech company that makes honor of kings, among many other titles. It's the country's

largest video game seller by far, and one of the most valuable companies in the world. And Tencent

seemingly took it so much to heart that it announced within hours of that article going live,

and their stock prices plummeting as a consequence.

The company losing about 10% of its overall value, which subtracted about $60 billion from its market capitalization.

Within hours of that, they announced that they would be imposing new restrictions on how children were able to access

and play their games. Among the specific restrictions they've announced in the weeks since

is an augmentation of their existing child game playing limitation systems, strengthening their

processes for weeding out kids who are lying

about their age as a means of passing through the filter that they currently have in place,

and decreasing the amount of time kids are allowed to play their games each day, from one

and a half hours, a limit that resulted from a previous government ruling on this issue that passed a few years back down to one hour a day.

Though that goes up to two hours on holidays, which is down from the previous three hours, and they said that they would support a ban on video games for

children under the age of 12, though kids of that age are currently allowed to play in accordance

with those aforementioned time limitations. But they are no longer able to spend money

within these games after this new round of limitations.

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