China gaming crackdown: Tencent prompts young gamers to adhere to 14-hour playtime limit during four-week winter break

Tencent Holdings, which runs the world’s biggest video gaming business by revenue and China’s largest social media platform, is reminding its game subscribers aged under 18 to strictly follow their 14-hour playtime limit during the four-week winter break.

The company has drawn up a calendar from January 17 to February 15 and marked the 14 days, including the weekends and the Lunar New Year holiday, when young video gaming subscribers are only allowed to play one hour each day, based on the Chinese government’s latest mandate, according to a post by Tencent Games on its WeChat account on Monday. Tencent Games is a business unit under the Shenzhen-based internet giant’s Interactive Entertainment Group.

Gamers aged under 18 are restricted to playing between 8pm and 9pm only on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and statutory holidays, according to new rules introduced last August by the National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA), China’s top watchdog for gaming and other forms of online media. That marked the country’s most stringent measure yet to tackle video gaming addiction among young people.

In its post on Monday, Tencent warned its young subscribers that stealing their family members’ identifications to bypass the gaming restrictions would initiate the facial recognition process for logins. It added that parents could also set their gaming accounts on so-called youth mode – a function used by Chinese internet platforms to protect teenagers from gaming addiction and inappropriate short videos.

Tencent’s pre-holiday warning to its young gaming subscribers reflects what founder, chairman and chief executive Pony Ma Huateng described in a recent internal speech as the company’s resolve to do its job without crossing any lines, and its commitment to serve as an “assistant and connector” for the country and society.