China is home to many, many video game developers who cater to the country’s massive market, but therein lies a problem in which the government believes that too many people are playing video games that could potentially be detrimental to their health. So much so that they have since formed an Online Game Ethics Committee to address those concerns.
For example one of the concerns that they’ll be addressing is to determine whether or not games are considered to be “healthy and beneficial” to the gamer, and if they might also have “social concerns”. Exactly what that means is unclear as it does seem to be very subjective, but presumably game addiction is one of the issues that they might be looking at, as well as clamping down on games that are too sexual or violent in nature.
In fact some of these issues have been addressed in the past, where some developers like Blizzard had to heavily censor aspects of its World of Warcraft MMORPG in order to make it compliant with the government’s standards and regulations. This included removing skeletons, skulls, blood, and so on.
So far the committee has reviewed about 20 games, where they have rejected 9 of them and are demanding that changes be made to the other 11 in order for them to be approved. No word on what these titles are, but it is something developers will need to take into consideration if they’re hoping to launch their games in the country.