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China Enforces Even Stricter Regulation On Games
eldavojohn writes "Chinese gamers have a pretty hard life. From crackdowns on 'undesirable' games to bans on gangster games to delayed World of Warcraft expansions, they suffer. The worst part is that in order to qualify for operating in China, you face a maze of conflicting bureaucracy and regulation. Well, it just got a little worse. Now, if you want to operate, you need to hire a 'specialist' to oversee content, and you need to 'enhance socialist values' in your game. They also want to limit in-game marriages and how many player-versus-player combat sessions one can engage in. The circular issued from China's Ministry of Culture contained all the vague verbiage giving them easier reign over who operates and who doesn't. It's a large market, but is it worth the gamble to game developers?"
I heard they are banning all Wii games with the word "Party" in the title.
There are plenty of game developers that would love to capture part of the Chinese market. It's mainly developers that operate a bit too close to prohibited levels of hedonism and a few other touchy subjects that will have problems, and it's not like Chinese need games tailored to them - people taking the effort to make a game could go worldwide if their game won't work in China.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
It's a large market, but is it worth the gamble to game developers?
Are you nuts? It's a market that in a few years will be 5-10 times larger than the US market, taking into account that asian cultures are more open to gaming in general (see Korea for example). If there is any single market in the world that's worth it, it's China.
Other industry has been there, done that. Car manufacturers all knew after the initial surprises that if they open a factory in China, their blueprints will be copied and another chinese factory somewhere else will produce the same cars for a cheaper price. Some stayed out of China for that reason. Until the chinese began to buy cars. Then, they had no choice but to do it, because they couldn't sell on the chinese market without having a chinese factory. They did it knowing full well the damage they'd sustain.
Frankly, ten years from now, game developers will probably wonder whether it's worth the trouble anymore translating their games for the US market.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Don't worry, as with all business in China you just have to know who to bribe.
How about I develop a game that caters EXACTLY what the Chinese government would like, and then they use their overpowered censorship and propoganda to promote it and only it...
Question Marks
Profit?
It seems like trouble taking video games to market is the least of the Chinese people's worries regarding use of technology.
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Hypertext isn't what it's marked up to be
PvP cuts into the gold-farming time - gotta keep pushing the GDP up!
There is a software market in China? I mean one that generatess actual money, and doesn't just pirate everything?
I guess 2% of a billion is a pretty big number.
Mod parent up. This law is basically saying "You must hit all of these subjective benchmarks." That's code for "You must pay us enough money to agree that you are hitting all of these subjective benchmarks."
Laws are rarely about what's good for the people. They're usually about what's good for the lawmakers. Occasionally the two coincide.
...none of those regulations apply to their goldfarming services targeted to large First World markets.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
If enough companies/games don't attempt to penetrate the Chinese market due to the ridiculous red tape and censoring, maybe the people will get upset enough to do something about it!
By "take games seriously" are you referring to the people in their 20s that still spend all their spare time playing games? They need to grow up?
Or do you mean the people that think games have are extremely influential on people... you think they need to grow up?
Whether or not PvP is good or bad is one argument, but arguing that games don't really influence people is ridiculous. If nothing else, it consumes their time, for better or worse. Games - and all entertainment - is not a neutral activity, just as reading a book isn't. Movies, games, and books (and TV, radio, etc) all influence people; game creators, movie producers, and authors can push behaviors, points, agendas, etc. It's not the medium that makes something "neutral" or non-influential.
1. If you are playing the Call of Duty campaign and you pick up an ammo pack, you only get 1/10 of the ammo and the rest go to your NPC squadmates. If you point out that they are idiotic clowns that never pick up ammo to give to you in return, it's "Game Over" as you are sent to a reeducation camp to rid you of your bourgeoiseity.
2. In Resident Evil, all the money you collect to buy items will instead be melted down to produce a golden plow. Instead, which weapons you get in the store depends on how badly you have played before. If you want that rocket launcher, you had better get shot up quite a bit before you visit. Make sure you drop those health packs behind a corner.
3. In Betrayal at Krondor, if you haggle too much with a merchant, you are seeking to exploit your position of privilege to subdue to rights of the worker, and the labour union of every store on the world map will make their merchants refuse to sell to you.
4. In Super Mario Bros., there's no point in playing, because the princess gets her just dessert after gorging on the paltry meals of the people. The revised edition has Bowser wear a top hat, and you are saving a revolutionary songwriter.
5. In Zelda, you can only play the game once a year. This is because everyone in the game must take a turn in being allowed to use the sword, which is the only sword in existence. It is bourgeoise to claim that just because your parents were such-and-such, and you found a sword that someone else left in the forest, you should be allowed to keep it away from being shared with the people.
6. In Harvest Moon, the amount of money you get allocated will be lower the more you produce. This is because everyone should give according to ability and receive according to need, and since you obviously dig like a freaking maniac while nobody else in the village does, you have just proved that you are able to dig like a freaking maniac which nobody else has. Since you were a capitalist before, it should be expected that you conceal part of the produce.
. If there is any single market in the world that's worth it, it's the United States of America.
FIFY.
Other industry has been there, done that. Car manufacturers all knew after the initial surprises that if they open a factory in China, their blueprints will be copied and another chinese factory somewhere else will produce the same cars for a cheaper price. Some stayed out of China for that reason.
Good reason to stay out of a Second(Russia) World or Third World country(China/India/Brazil) and manufacture in a First World(US/UK/Pre-Expansion EU) one.
Besides, you're selling largely to party bosses anyway. The rest are just junk-grade copies.
Frankly, ten years from now, game developers will probably wonder whether it's worth the trouble anymore translating their games for the US market.
They will translate for the US and it won't be a second-rate job. End of story.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
You could make a video game of getting guy developing and publishing a video game in China.
Oh the Onion'y of it all.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Anyone but me recognize this as an EXCELLENT opportunity for these "specialists" to get paid? This IS China we are talking about.
Any respectable company should boycott the Chinese market over this. It isn't a gamble to sell games to china that meet their criteria, however it does mean that you sold out your conscience for more profits. Personally I'd refuse to make changes from a piece of artwork to appease the establishment.
Probably best for an offshore dev team to do that, or "The heads that you explode might be your own"...
And that's different with respect to other countries, how?
Other countries have at least some amount freedom of speech.
More Twoson than Cupertino
The funny thing is, by reading Slashdot, one gets the impression that the CCP (and thus the gummint) has clamped down on everything.
Yet, I know people who travel there regularly and they state, you can get anything you want as long as you know where to go or who to talk to. Much is readily available in stores which is supposedly banned.
China may pass laws, but the enforcement is a whole different matter.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Now, if we can only get Jack Thompson to learn Chinese and move to Beijing, we could finally get him out of our hair and inflict him on someone else. It would be a career move in keeping with his past "crusades". Of course, the Chinese may consider such a move an act of war.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
They want you to be in violation of something. With all the legislation, it is impossible to comply with every single law without driving yourself out of business. Everyone knows it, and the Chinese government (at central, provincial, city, and district levels, which are all different and have little relation with each other) knows it too. They like knowing that they can shut you down at any time, but are usually content to let things go as long as you play ball. This kind of ball-play can be laissez faire for years or it can be an "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it further" kind of situation. You really have no way of knowing how it will turn out, and the government likes it like that. This is why it's so important to have buddies in government who can warn you of upcoming problems or give you some lamb's blood to mark yourself so the inspectors pass you over. I had one high muckety-muck vice-director of the municipal propaganda ministry hold my product in his hand as if he were weighing it, and said it was about 80% legal. I couldn't puzzle it out, either it's legal or illegal, how can legality be a percentage, and a guess at that! Later I got it...I felt pretty dumb. It was obvious, only my cultural blinders kept me from seeing it.
And to those of you who are already hitting "reply" to say "durr, just like my country only my country is much worse", do you have a ministry of culture whose job it is to enhance socialist values? With lawyers and truncheons if necessary? You can joke all you like about capitalism taking over but there are plenty of true-believer Mao-worshipping socialists in the government.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Its called a dogmatic National Interest. Welcom to international super power politics and self interest. Its how we all feel indignantly justified in our ethnocentric human nature. If the media is from a "foreign" undesirable culture then please feel free to steal it since we won't let you buy it, and you are a criminal anyway. But the legitimate stuff that they sell, first and foremost. America just can't seem to wrap their minds around the fact that China, the most populous nation by far, is not a democracy. If it we're, they'd out vote us every time. Which is exactly how they handle us anyway. Its like trying to push a sleepy grumpy Yak up a mountain with a twig. Moooooo.
"China's going to be a HUGE market!" is the China fallacy, which operates with the assumption that consumers in China are like consumers elsewhere, and that as soon as they get money they will become a gold mine.
That is a fallacy that's been going on for three to four hundred plus years, and contributed directly to the downfall of the Qing Emperor, the Open Door policy, and all the other problems that China's been trying to recover from for the last hundred years. See, China's culture is very nationalistic and one of their flaws is that they believe they are the center of the Earth. In the mercantile age, that meant that China always exported its goods but would only accept silver from the West because western goods were always seen as 'inferior'. It almost bankrupted the British Empire, and did significant economic damage to the other Western countries, so they retaliated by basically taking over China's ports (and the whole country) to boot.
To assume that once THIS happens then China will open up to the West is wrong. China will continue what it's doing right now with the currency, and with it's trade policies: accepting money (in the form of Treasury debt and other convertibles) and exporting its goods without buying our goods, because they do not want to be 'dependent' on us. This is at the heart of the Chinese currency manipulation problem - that China is doing exactly what it did 200+ years ago - hoarding monetary assets while not accepting imports from us and slowly bankrupting us. They're not doing it out of spite, they're doing it because to them, all other countries and cultures are 'inferior' to a degree and they want to be the center of the world - and the center never accepts help from the edges.
That's why the best route for developers is to ignore China. Don't buy into the fallacy, because then you force China to accept your goods, and in doing so, you fix the imbalance.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Funny how the USA has to deal with similar issues... but China-- they were supposed to be communist! They couldn't even keep the capitalist flame under control for a generation and its a wild fire already. The USA managed to go longer; but we in many ways are in the same boat anyhow... (for the religious zealots; surely you can now acknowledge a simple fire == capitalism analogy after the recent banking/credit/insurance mess. )
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
"One of the things I have always found troubling about Westerners doing business in emerging market countries is that they sometimes take an almost perverse pride in discussing payoffs to government officials. It is as though their having paid a bribe is a symbol of their international sophistication and insider knowledge. Yet, countless times when I am told of the bribe, I know the very same thing could almost certainly have been accomplished without a bribe." --Source
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
actually, in providing the game even neutered, the Chinese will probably be forced to change over time. They will never really be able to keep a lid on cultural control and anyone that plays the actual game will be pissed that they are not allowed to play the good version.
If you are an American and truly believe that our basic freedoms should be universal, then you are no less than a traitor to your own people if you agree to work under these guidelines. If a popular game like WoW was to make this stand you would have millions of people demanding change.
Misclicked and mismodded your post, posting to remove
Any respectable company...
We'll let you know if we see any.
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
MW3 has been out for a while and I don't remember House Liao being mentioned.
Because bribes in the US are under the table and are prosecuted; in China they are expected and no one cares.
Hmmmm, sounds like they took a page out of Apple's playbook.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Because in China, it not only occurs, it is expected. Read, for example, "The Outlaws of the Marsh", which is set in the Song Dynasty. Official bribery is part of Chinese culture.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Don't underestimate the sincerity of people who legislate "socialist values" in China. Many of those people actually mean what they say. The Party remains in power by providing a harmonious society. Which is to say, standards of moral and ethical values. In fact, history shows that China gets restive when they get the feeling that top-down control is *not* being applied to solve problems. That's what happens when an Emperor and the imperial bureaucracy is the central focus of your society for about 3000 years.
That's not to say that profit is not to be made on such laws, but these laws have their own purpose, above and beyond simply being cynical bids for bribery. Even if there was no profit to be made on them, they would still make these laws.
Have 20 million Chinese WoW addicts have their game taken away.
Occasionally the two coincide.
[Citation Needed]
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
I think the question is it ethical to do so? Yes, this, like the fucked up Google results are one of those cases where you could suggest that the people of China are better served by a government manipulated service than no service at all, but what about us? What does it say about us?
I would refuse to work for a company that made such compromises on freedom at all, I mean what do these guys tell their friends/family/kids?
- What you do you do daddy?
- Well I make sure the young population of china never gets a feeling of independence or self worth outside remaining subservient to the state honey.
But... the future refused to change.
...All they are doing is making a market for imported, pirated and bootlegged games. Want to be the cool kid at school, then pick you have the uncensored version of a game. A usb drive in your pocket, an SD card hidden inside a birthday card would be easy ways to slip games and other content into china.
This is NOT flamebait.
Those who think it is are fools as there is no form of incorruptible government. Some are worse than others but even then it depends on who you are and it's very much a mater of perception.
Other countries have at least some amount freedom of speech.
What good is freedom of speech if it's just used to condemn you later? I donno if you've been paying attention but here in the US you might have the right to say whatever you like but it will get you on some government harassment list and fired from your job in a heart beat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary
Leary's first run-in with the law came on December 20, 1965. During a border crossing with his wife and two children from Mexico into the United States, marijuana was found in a bag in his car. After taking responsibility for the controlled substance, Leary was convicted of possession under the Marihuana Tax Act on March 11, 1966, and sentenced to 30 years in jail
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO (an acronym for Counter Intelligence Program) was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States. The FBI used covert operations from its inception, however formal COINTELPRO operations took place between 1956 and 1971.[2] The FBI's stated motivation at the time was "protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order." [3]
Things have only gotten worse over time. The Constitution and even the laws of this country are meaningless to those in power. Don't ever forget your place and think you are free...
Because bribes in the US are under the table and are prosecuted; in China they are expected and no one cares.
Just because you haven't been asked for bribes, kickbacks or favors don't mean the rest of us haven't had to deal with it at some point and it is very common. The only real difference is people don't normally come out and say it here. So if you can't take a hint then you aren't getting the contract.
Because in China, it not only occurs, it is expected. Read, for example, "The Outlaws of the Marsh", which is set in the Song Dynasty. Official bribery is part of Chinese culture.
Yes it is but how is that better?
Is It somehow better to hide the fact that you're a corrupt official?
Now don't misunderstand I have no desire to move my ass to china but I gotta give them some respect for being up front about being evil. At least their people know how things work unlike over here where people think the government isn't evil and that big happy "we are helping you" smile is real.
China Enforces Even Stricter Regulation On Games
By "enforce" they mean "beat you to death if you fail to comply."
Money speaks rather freely everywhere, no?
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
Sounds almost exactly how the mafia operates.
Another important reason why the government is posing more restrictions on gaming in China is due to game itself is becoming an important medium in China, which you can effectively reach the youth group in China [as well as the last US election]. Probably the only channel the government left in the wild without censorship for the past decade. Young people in China really don't have much option to choose a hobby, the only thing that is cheap and people can have fun is online gaming, that is why internet cafes are still filled with young people and underage children [gov require to be 18 to enter internet cafes in china during schools which is poorly enforced].
So in other words, in order for the thugocrats who run the Chinese prison state to make nice, you have to create games that lie?
Communism is evil.
Socialism is just a euphemism for Communism.
The thugocrats in who run China have a profound understanding of Communism. It is a tool by which the ruthless few can gain and keep power over the helpless many.
The thugocrats don't really BELIEVE in communism. What they do believe is that they should have power over their fellow man and that communism provides a way to do this.
They hate democracy precisely because it would take power away from them spread it far and wide.
I would not want to create content that justifies the rule of these thugs.
But like someone else has already mentioned, in a corrupt society like China, it all comes down to who you bribe and how generous your offer is.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
You are hilarious. The Western world works on bribes, you really think it's any different in China? It's not always cash, either. Sometimes it's jobs, or some other currency, which will be used to enhance money, prestige, or power for a given individual. Bribes are just a distillation of politics.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So what you suggest is that since South Koreans like Starcraft, the Chinese will bend over backwards to buy every game out there? What does South Korea have to do with China? Oh right, they're all "asian cultures". Cuz you know, there is this one monolithic cultural identity spanning the entirety of a quarter of the world's population with no variability whatsoever.
Of course. If you pull up your container ship and fill out 389 forms and submit them to the appropriate 37 agencies you could be offloading it in a mere 17 weeks.
Or, you could pay the guy supervising the dock $10k (with the supervisor distributing it as needed), and be unloaded and headed out to sea in a day or two.
There is ALWAYS a legitimate way to do business. The guys taking the bribes wouldn't have it any other way - so that they can point to the official process when people come in questioning the practice of taking bribes. However, unless you have connections (just another form of a bribe - the ability to grant favors), the official process tends to be ineffective.