HONG KONG (Reuters) – Tencent Holdings will expand an addiction-prevention system for underage gamers to all or any of its games, this company said on Monday, since the industry faces increased government scrutiny.
A “healthy gaming” system this includes deadlines on daily play and will perform facial recognition-aided ID checks, already utilized on Tencent’s most popular Honour of Kings smartphone game, are going to be given to nine other mobile games this year and expanded to protect all Tencent games batch that we get, the provider said in the post on its official WeChat account.
The move marks Tencent’s latest seek to match the Chinese government’s demand tighter controls to combat gaming addiction and increasing near-sightedness among young adults. Scenario announcement in August requested the publishing regulator to operate the volume of new picture games also to limit the times of day young Chinese spend playing such games.
Tencent, the world’s largest gaming company by revenue, has come upon regulatory roadblocks this coming year and Chinese authorities are yet to approved any new games since March.
Without approval for in-app purchases Tencent continues to be not able to make money using a number of its hugely popular games, just like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Mobile (PUBG Mobile), the industry game that CLSA estimates could generate about $1 billion in annual revenue if given a monetization license.
Shares in Tencent, that contain slid by 28 percent in 2010 to knock $138 billion away from the company’s price, were down 3.7 percent at Monday’s close, lagging a 2 percent drop to the benchmark Hang Seng Index.
Tencent in September announced the master plan to increase the real-name registration system for first time gamers on its mobile battle game Honour of Kings. The fantasy role-playing battle game has proved well liked that Tencent introduced restrictions to playing here we are at children in July a year ago responding to criticism by state media over game addiction.
Children aged 12 and under are permitted sixty minutes every day for the game excepting a curfew amount 9pm to 8am. Minors older than 12 can play for two hours every day.
Tencent said inside Monday’s post not wearing running shoes used facial recognition-aided identity verification for first time players in Beijing and Shenzhen in September. Since October, they are verifying existing users’ ID information and expects to perform accomplishing this after this month.
(This version of the story plot is refiled to correct typographical error in third paragraph)
(Reporting by Sijia Jiang; Editing by David Goodman)
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