In its latest attempt to stop online gambling on its mainland, China will no longer allow poker and mahjong video games to be sold in its country.
According to a Techcrunch article, the country’s State Administration of Press and Publication resumed the approval process for new video game licenses on Monday after a huge backlog caused the government to stop accepting new submissions.
As the government approval process resumed, they announced that those video games that were centered around gambling activities would no longer be granted licenses. The agency cited concerns that these video games could help facilitate illegal gambling rings.
The new law will “wipe out hundreds of small developers focused on this genre,” according to Techcrunch. The larger developers, who already have developed and been approved for this type of game in the past will still be able to sell their games, however.
“It won’t affect us much because we are early to the market and have accumulated a big collection of licenses,” a marketing manager at one of China’s biggest poker and mahjong games publishers told Techcrunch.
Currently, gambling in mainland China is illegal outside of state-run lotteries. Chinese citizens must go to special administrative regions in Hong Kong and Macau in order to participate in legal gambling activities.
This development will eliminate a huge chunk of China’s video game market. According to Niko Partners, a video game research company in Asia, 37 percent of the games approved in 2017 were poker and mahjong related. There were 8,561 games approved that year. The company said that these types of video games are cheap and easy to make.
Historically, China has been very strict when it comes to any possibility of gambling in their country. Last September, the government forced tech giant Tencent to shut down a popular poker app called “Everyday Texas Hold’Em.” They also were forced to remove the World Series of Poker app from the WeChat app store.
Just a month later, the Chinese government blocked its citizens from using the Poker King app, which unlike Tencent’s apps, were accepting real money wagers.
Despite heavy regulation and crackdowns from the mainland. Macau remains the world’s largest gaming market and generated $37.6 billion in revenue in 2018.
