Tencent launches new checks to weed out underage gaming
amid China crackdown
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[September 06, 2018]
By Sijia Jiang
HONG KONG (Reuters) - China's biggest
gaming and social media firm Tencent Holdings unveiled new checks aimed
at restricting access to its popular games for underaged players, amid a
government campaign to tackle gaming addiction among Chinese children.
Tencent said on Thursday it will introduce from around September 15 a
real name-based registration system for new players of its Honour of
Kings game to identify minors.
The system would be linked to China's public security database and would
be the first of its kind in the Chinese gaming industry, it said. It
will be able to accurately identify underaged players and impose the
relevant play time restrictions it had set previously, it said.
"Through these measures, Tencent hopes to continue to better guide
underaged players to game sensibly," the company said in a statement on
its official WeChat account, adding it plans to gradually expand the
requirement to its other games.
Honour of Kings, a fantasy multiplayer role-playing battle game, is the
top-grossing mobile game in China.
Shares of Tencent extended their losses in afternoon trade after the
announcement, sliding more than 3 percent to their lowest level in more
than a year. That lagged a 1 percent fall in the benchmark Hang Seng
Index.
Tencent, Asia's second-biggest listed firm by market capitalisation, has
lost a staggering $197 billion in value since a peak in January.
Shares of two other major game developers, China Youzu Interactive and
Perfect World, dropped 5.5 percent and 3.6 percent, respectively, while
the IT sub-index was down about 2.4 pct in Hong Kong.
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A Tencent sign is seen
during the fourth World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang
province, China, December 4, 2017. REUTERS/Aly Song/File Photo
Tencent's move comes a week after China called for more play time
restrictions citing rising levels of myopia among Chinese children,
heightening regulatory risks for companies in the world's biggest gaming
market.
The impact of online games on the country's youth has attracted scrutiny
from Chinese President Xi Jinping, who recently urged governments at all
levels to implement effective schemes to prevent and treat the high
incidence of myopia.
Last year, China's Communist Party mouthpiece, the People's Daily,
described Honour of Kings as poison and called for tighter regulatory
controls of online games.
In response, Tencent started imposing a playtime restriction since last
July, allowing a maximum of one hour a day for children 12 years old and
under, and a maximum of two hours for those between 13 and 18.
($1 = 7.8490 Hong Kong dollars)
(Reporting By Sijia Jiang and Donny Kwok; Editing by Anne Marie Roantree
and Muralikumar Anantharaman)
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