Chinese Government Cracks Down On Foreign MMOs?

Thanks to The Korea Herald for its article regarding the battle for the massive Chinese online gaming market. Apparently, "Korean companies controlled more than 70 percent of the Chinese online game market last year in terms of revenue", but: "Last July, China's Ministry of Culture imposed a new regulation on 'Internet culture supervision,' which forces online games and all other programs transacted via the Internet to be reported to the ministry for content supervision." Due to this move, "foreign Internet content providers... [are] required to earn an ICP (Internet content provider) license... NCsoft has not received its license for 'Lineage II' as of yet." In conclusion, it's actually suggested that "worst-case scenario would be a quota on the import of foreign games, according to some analysts."

Comments

Export bnetd to China.

[Anonymous Coward]

So Vivendi-Blizzard acts like a jackbooted thug and pulls bnetd, and that's OK. But a sovreign nation tries to control what goes on it its own borders, and Slashdot is up in arms.

Re:Mafia

[Herkum01]

You don't do business over here, unless you partner up with our businesses, you scratch our back, we scratch yours

Should have read, "unless you partner up with our business, at which point we attempt to steal everything from you." Chinese partnerships are notorious at attempting to shaft their partners, including other chinese. The difference between the chinese partners and foreign ones is that a chinese partner will expect it.

More likely they will come up with some regulation that they will pass some rule, that will be ignored but most chinese anyways because it can be very hard to monitor individual gaming. They will probalbly concentrate on controlling the money flow from those gamers.

I am sure that you will find the game in the cyber cafe's so there will not be a limit on distribution, hard to limit software piracy in China, it will all come down to the money, where it goes.

Re:Mafia

[saden1]

They are successful in the sense that they take sides in a complaint and demand that problems be remedied. The problem is, everyone can appeal and that process takes forever. Usually countries settle their differences amicably but in the case of US steal the EU actually took steps to levy heavy duty on some US imports with the support of WTO.

p.s. I get mod points on a weekly basis and I never manage to use them all. Oh and your chance will be better if your karma is excellent.