And protectionism is to blame.
The General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) intends to tighten approval criteria for online game imports in an effort to protect the development of domestic online game enterprises and avoid the excessive penetration of foreign culture among Chinese youth, reports Sohu quoting GAPP Technology and Digital Publishing Bureau Director Kou Xiaowei on March 16. GAPP will move from inspection standards that treat domestic and foreign games equally to become more strict when dealing with influential games such as The9’s (Nasdaq:NCTY) licensed MMORPG World of Warcraft, said Kou.
If you can’t beat them… get the government to beat them.
Note that this will mainly impact The9 (which has said they face bankruptcy if the state shenanigans continue to shenanigate). Blizzard themselves already has something of a contingency plan: another Chinese distributor, SoftWorld, in Taiwan, outside the reach of the “protection of Chinese culture” of the People’s Republic. The9 has already seen significant losses to the Taiwan version of WoW, which unlike The9 already has Wrath of the Lich King ready to go. And the fact that The9 is partially owned by a familiar company may indicate shenanigans of an entirely different sort.
#1 by mandrill on March 17th, 2009
Blizzard needs to bite the bullet and start handing over the brown envelopes. They’re being so obviously squeezed for backhanders its unreal. Last week it was ‘Questionable Content’ this week its about protecting the chinese games industry. Yeah, pull the other one,its got epics on.
#2 by Vetarnias on March 17th, 2009
@mandrill
And if I were the US government, I’d prohibit companies from dealing in “brown envelopes” with a totalitarian state with ambitions of superpower status.
#3 by Longasc on March 17th, 2009
The “Winnenden school shooting” one week ago started the discussion about “killer games” (like Counter-Strike – it is the only game that most critics that fear that computergames turn us into monsters know at least by name) in Germany again.
Suddenly the discussion changed. It was no longer about the influence of violence in computer games on young gamers, but someone discovered a study that told that 14.000 school kids are addicted to computer gaming.
Then someone else noted that World of Warcraft is a very addictive game (the same stuff we heard about EverQuest years ago). Then some politicians got to the logical (hehe…) conclusion that people should not be allowed to play World of Warcraft before they are 18 (age of majority in Germany). This will protect the Federal Republic from suicidial maniacs for sure!
IMO: Even if WoW would be restricted to adults, kids would just play with their father being the account owner, as most already do. He pays the bills, after all. So I doubt Blizzard would lose many subscribers in Germany.
What makes me sad is that Germany feels a bit like China these days…
#4 by Leper on March 17th, 2009
@Vetarnias
The US government does prohibit bribery to foreign officials, under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
#5 by Delmania on March 17th, 2009
Bah, more of the same from China. Maybe The9 should start offering micro transactions in WoW so the gov’t can tax them. Then change the Forsaken to have no bones, remove all the skeletons, and label is a homegrown AMMO!
#6 by yunk on March 17th, 2009
“If you can’t beat them… get the government to beat them”
They learned it from us.
You know when I played video games too long my parents turned it off and made me go outside. I know it sounds crazy! But it just might work. Maybe it takes a parent to raise a child rather than rely on their village?
#7 by Bonedead on March 17th, 2009
RIVETING !
#8 by faefrost on March 17th, 2009
It will be riveting to see if someone brings a WoW based action before the WTO.
#9 by Adele on March 17th, 2009
On the bright side… no more gold farmers!
#10 by Daniel on March 17th, 2009
@Longasc. My first computer game was Wizardry. If anything, playing these games makes me a more peaceful person precisely because there is so much killing going on. I get sick of it.
Here’s a thought experiment: imagine that your toon on WoW was really you. Really really you. Would you want to live in that world for real? I know in the hell I wouldn’t want to do that; scares me to death. WoW is fun to play precisely because it’s not real.
Computer games are easy to blame because the connection between seeing violence and doing violence seems so “intuitive”. But I’m actually quite convinced it has the opposite affect psychologically: it makes people less prone to violence, not more.
#11 by Mist on March 17th, 2009
Tienanmen Square didn’t spark revolution in China, but taking away their WoW just might.
#12 by wowpanda on March 17th, 2009
The near term effect will be, WOW and other MMOs already in China has a short term monopoly, which no new competitions….
Almost like China saying “We want to protect our own CPU lines so no new CPU manufacturers can enter us any more”.
#13 by Athryn on March 17th, 2009
Except for the fact that a lot of gold farmers are from countries other than China. There are a surprisingly large number of them from Eastern Europe, actually.
#14 by Vetarnias on March 17th, 2009
Nah, the government will just start claiming that the game that presumably a few million Chinese people used to play, well, never existed.
#15 by dartwick on March 17th, 2009
On the surface this is interesting. But it rapidly becomes boring with a cursory perusal.
#16 by Vetarnias on March 17th, 2009
@dartwick
Which is also what I would say about World of Warcraft.
#17 by Daniel Whitcomb on March 17th, 2009
@Adele
Not only is this vaguely racist, it’s also wrong. The Gold Farmers on North American Servers play on said NA Servers run by Blizzard themselves, or they wouldn’t be a problem in the first place. Any actual Chinese Gold farmers operating on North American Servers will not be affected by this, since the accounts they use are from North American servers run by Blizzard, not The9.
#18 by Iconic on March 17th, 2009
@Daniel
The problem is that the few studies done so far do in fact support the “common sense” theory that acting out violence in fantasy correlates to violent behavior in general.
It’s a well known fact that the human brain can easily be “primed” through the unsophisticated use of language or images. Show some one pictures of happy people and when you ask them how they feel a short time later they are far more likely to say that they are happy. Show them violent images and when you ask them how they’d react or solve a problem, they are more likely to specify a violent response. The same thing plays out in actual behavior.
It is not a rational behavior– people don’t generally perceive that their behavior is linked to these “priming” images or ideas, as they are not acting on a conscious thought pattern. It’s simply the way the human mind works– the mind easily moves along paths it has recently tread.
This does not mean that Counterstrike causes some kid to shoot up his school. Obviously there are a lot of other things going on when some one makes a conscious decision to plan and execute a homicidal rampage that have little or nothing to do with weak sub conscious thought priming.
#19 by Bonedead on March 17th, 2009
Wow, really? Don’t call me a gold farmer, you racist!
#20 by no hands on March 17th, 2009
Does this mean, since I play a healer in WoW, I’m more likely to want to aid people in need? If you play a tank, are you more likely to want to protect people? The solution, clearly, is to make Ulduar require 14 healers, 10 tanks, and 1 dps class, preferably the moonkin variety — because really, how dangerous can overgrown owls standing in moonlight and starlight be? Then we can start conditioning our children appropriately!
#21 by Nerd Rage on March 17th, 2009
@Iconic
The US Court of Appeals does not agree.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a3GUPkag7aDg&refer=us
For what it’s worth, I do not agree either. I won’t argue that exposure to violence can make people more confrontational, I won’t even argue that exposure to violence makes people more inclined to favor a violent solution, those are probably true statements, but to claim it actually makes them more likely to carry out a violent act is a stretch. There’s a pretty significant leap from saying “I’m gonna kick his ass” to actually going over there and kicking his ass.
Unless these studies allowed people to physically assault one another, the verbal response that they’d do something violent to solve a problem is meaningless. Maybe they think they want to, but when it comes time to actually do it they will (most of the time) realize they were wrong. There are other studies that demonstrate the psychological resistance (most) people have to carrying out an act of violence.
Edit – link did not show the first time
#22 by Viz on March 18th, 2009
@Daniel
Dude, what kind of masochist would want be a tank in real life? The fact that you get healed doesn’t mean you didn’t feel the hit when it happened.
#23 by dartwick on March 18th, 2009
lolz at Danial trying to play the race card
#24 by Einherjer on March 18th, 2009
@Daniel
There is a reason why chinese gold farmers are prominent in RMT. It’s the same reason why most, if not all, of your electric appliances and your kids toys have “made in PRC” (“made in china” started to be synonimous of “defective product” so they revamped it).
It’s not about race it’s about a huge country with 1+ billion people working for bowls of rice.
#25 by Daniel Whitcomb on March 18th, 2009
All Gold Farmers aren’t Chinese. It’s simply not true. It’s a stereotype. There ARE Chinese gold farmers, but not all gold farmers are chinese, and automatically assuming they all are is making a blanket racial judgement that’s, at the least, on the level of “All you people look the same to me.” In addition, in this case it’s compounded by the fact that it’s not true even if it was that simple. If the gold farmers were farming on the9 controlled servers, they’d have no gold to SELL on NA/EU/other localized servers.
#26 by Sheepherder on March 19th, 2009
Except he’s still right insofar as his examples extend. Priming is the sort of thing they teach in intro-level psych courses alongside the various forms of conditioning and other basics.
Which isn’t to say that video games will cause premeditated violence. It also isn’t to say that they will cause any level of violence unless your friend attempts to stunlock you in the school cafeteria, in which case you may go apeshit.