Tencent is changing one of its apps in such a way that it will prevent Chinese players from playing games made outside the country, Reuters reported Thursday.
Officially, the Chinese government must approve every game that's released and operated in China, but players have long had options that let them circumvent those rules. Tencent provided one such method, offering network acceleration tools that let gamers play on foreign servers.
Now, Tencent plans to update one of those tools so that it will only support games that officially operate in China from May 31 onward. The company did not provide a reason for the change, but it comes on the heels of new measures by the Chinese government to both control which games are released in China and how much people play games in the country, limiting the time minors can legally game to just three hours per week and introducing spending caps.
The Chinese government spent the last nine months refusing to allow any new games to be released in the country, only breaking that drought earlier this week to provide licenses to 45 games. Many of those were developed in China. More than 14,000 development studios reportedly closed in China over that time. That was also the second nine-month freeze on approvals following another in 2018.
