China has imposed even stricter regulations in order to curb gaming addiction amongst minors in the country. Last month, we reported that games giant Tencent implementing facial recognition technology that will identify minors who play the game between 10 pm to 8 am.

Now, China has introduced a new policy, which states that minors can only play games for one hour on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays between 8 pm to 9 pm. This was revealed via a recent tweet by video games industry analyst Daniel Ahmad.

China's game regulator continues to implement targeted regulations aimed at curbing game addiction among minors

New policy states that minors can only play games for one hour on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays between 8pm to 9pm.

An extremely restrictive policy. pic.twitter.com/kkbh9PGsND

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) August 30, 2021

The previous policy in China was 1.5 hours a day. The restriction will be enforced at the account level by using real-name registration and an anti-addiction system. There are allegedly approximately 110 million minors in China that play video games.

However, according to Tencent, players under 16 (those who count as minors) only account for about 2.6 percent of all spending by players. This means that the games industry in China won’t actually be too negatively impacted by the government’s decision, but there will still be at least some kind of detriment for developers.

For instance, game publisher Neon Doctrine co-founder Iain Garner has already tweeted about the matter on his personal Twitter account, confirming that they have already started to integrate the restrictive technology in their games.

He said:

We are currently integrating this tech now in Chinese platform games releases. The noose is tightening.

Neon Doctrine is best known for publishing games like Jack Axe, Lost Castle, Simulacra, Yuppie Psycho: Executive Edition, and more.

We are currently integrating this tech now in Chinese platform games releases. The noose is tightening. https://t.co/Pnd1XZuzxP

— Iain Garner (@NeonIain) August 30, 2021