Yahoo Finance Tencent, NetEase win new Chinese video game licences in March, as Beijing grants 86 approvals
Chinese regulators granted 86 video game licences for March, covering titles by market leaders Tencent Holdings and NetEase, days after issuing approvals for a batch of foreign games, in a sign of further normalisation after a year-long industry crackdown.
The National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA), the agency that oversees online games in China, published on Thursday the latest list of approved titles. The amount is in line with the 88 titles approved in January and 87 in February. It is also higher than any monthly domestic approval tally seen in 2022.
Tencent, the world's largest video game publisher by revenue, received the green light for The Last Blade, a martial arts-themed action mobile and personal computer game. NetEase, China's second-largest video gaming company, got a licence for mobile combat game Mission Zero.
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Several highly-anticipated games from smaller studios also won approvals, including Love and Deep Space, a three-dimensional action romance game developed by Shanghai-based PaperGames.
Approvals for domestic games, totalling 261 so far this year, already exceeded half of the number granted for the full year of 2022, when the NPPA approved 468 domestic games in seven batches.
Earlier this week, regulators also announced 27 newly licensed foreign games, the second batch of imported titles in less than three months. They include Tencent's mobile discovery puzzle game Merge Mansion, developed by Finnish studio Metacore, and NetEase's dance and rhythm game Audition: Everybody Party.
People play computer games at an internet cafe in Beijing. Photo: AFP alt=People play computer games at an internet cafe in Beijing. Photo: AFP>
The approvals suggest that the pace and size of China's video game approvals are stabilising after a year-long crackdown that started in late 2021, when authorities imposed an eight-month freeze on game approvals and imposed a three-hours-a-week online game time limit for minors.
Under regulatory and macroeconomic headwinds, video game sales in China slumped over 10 per cent to 269.5 billion yuan (US$39.8 billion) in 2022, marking the first drop in at least two decades, according to a report published in January by the country's semi-official gaming industry association.
Tencent, which saw its domestic game sales fall 4 per cent last year, has sharpened its focus on the international market, the company said in its earnings report this week.
Game sales in China have yet to recover, with numbers in February declining 22 per cent from a year ago to 21.6 billion yuan, according to the latest data from video gaming intelligence firm CNG.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2023 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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