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Chinese Consumers Can Now Buy Formerly Banned Consoles, Nationwide
PC Magazine reports that China has entered a new phase in its liberalization of game console sales. Restrictions amounting to a nationwide ban were loosened recently, so that manufacturers which produced (and sold) consoles in Shanghai's free trade zone were allowed to also sell their wares elsewhere in China. The newest change is to remove that geographic requirement, so Chinese buyers are expected to be able to buy whatever consoles they'd like. Games to play on those consoles, though, are a different story.
Did you see the restrictions on game content? It's broad enough to mean "anything we don't want to allow is banned."
* Gambling-related content or game features
* Anything that violates China’s constitution
* Anything that threatens China’s national unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity.
* Anything that harms the nation’s reputation, security, or interests.
* Anything that instigates racial/ethnic hatred, or harms ethnic traditions and cultures.
* Anything that violates China’s policy on religion by promoting cults or superstitions.
* Anything that promotes or incites obscenity, drug use, violence, or gambling.
* Anything that harms public ethics or China’s culture and traditions.
* Anything that insults, slanders, or violates the rights of others.
* Other content that violates the law
The old men that run the government still believe that console games are meant exclusively for children - or at least adults who need to be "protected from dangerous ideas" as though they were children. This is no different than what many of our own legislatures and citizen activists wished to impose on us... "for the children", of course, but fortunately, saner heads prevailed.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The reality of gaming in China is this:
The domestic version of the consoles is restrictive, actually, especially for foreigners in China in many cases. The domestic version of the PS4, for example, will only work with a Chinese playstation store ID - so you can't log in to your overseas-created ID from the Chinese console.
That being said, in China - now, as before, as always, you can very easily purchase whichever console you choose from graymarket shops. By gray market I mean fully legally functioning and not hiding anything shops (in Chengdu typically found on the 4th floor of the 'computer city' malls), often legally imported (illegally only if they were brought in without paying import taxes), from a variety of countries. In China, typically it means HK or Japanese models of the consoles and associated games. The shop I get my games from often has US versions of the games also, which I by far prefer because it lets me use the bonus content with my Canadian account.
Consoles and games were only really 'banned' from legitimate channels of mass market entry - never illegal in the sense they weren't allowed to be sold or owned or played, that's a notion that many people overseas simply don't understand when they read articles like this, which are a little bit misleading.
Oh, also, the piracy aspect of all consoles is equally gray market - each of those shops will mod any console they sell and let you transfer games from their game library upon purchase, or bring your HD in for a bunch of transfers, at the cost of about $1usd/game....banned, pfft.