Tencent et al already get a single digit percentage of their revenue from minor users on online games. It will not kill them.

There is also a massively underdeveloped market for single player Chinese games that is only recently starting that will benefit massively from this decision.

true, but how likely is it that those will get the ax too? Judging from past top down decisions like this, it seems more likely that companies or parents will over implement this and extend it to appease the higher ups. (Until they correct and clarify their initial statement... rinse and repeat)

From the wording of the notice, it seems that the government is aware that it's literally impossible to regulate offline games. People will just pirate them.

but there won't be any minor users graduating to of age users.

I'm making an educated guess here, but i'm betting you won't see a real surge in single player games.

I would bet money there is going to be a huge surge in single player games. Kids will play video games and companies want to make money.

Single player doesn't prevent them from being tied to an online service. Even in America, lots of modern "single player" games don't run without a connection to the internet.

These services could easily institute the same limitations on their SP games; forcing them to do online checks on certain events. They could even be sneaky about it by punishing you if you try to evade the checks somehow by deleting your save game, making the game more difficult, or employing other techniques used to dissuade pirates.

They can also do forced updates on software to fix any exploits, run background services that force kill executables, and a bunch of other stuff. Mobile devices are especially well locked down. It just depends on how badly the company wants to keep kids from playing the games. They just need to make it too big of a pain to worry about for 99.99% of gamers, then report the other 0.01% of troublemakers to the authorities.

Single player games that are always online are subject to the restrictions.

People will just pirate other games. Even on mobile. Every Android device will happily run pirated APKs.

Honestly, it'll just destroy the shitty gambling microtransaction games.

Most studios will focus on offline games again, back to old-school games.

Honestly, I'm a fan of this. No harm done to anything worth saving.

There are LOTS of online games that are not "shitty gambling microtransaction" games.

Even in the west where traditional, non-microtransaction games are very common, having an offline, single player, non-cooperative game is increasingly rare.

Then just regulate the microtransactions instead of doing this.

perfect example of a keyhole solution. Also perfect opportunity to link to my favourite propaganda site [0]

[0] https://openborders.info/keyhole-solutions/

The policy is targeting ONLINE games. Companies like Tencent will simply double down shipping those shitty games with loot boxes and microtransactions oversea to your kids. Meanwhile in China offline singleplayer games may see a boom.

I think they can make an effective offline grind that credits you when you log in and still comply with the law.

There's no way of authenticating actions that way. Everyone will just cheat and break the game.