Young Gamers are Already Circumventing China's 1-Hour Gaming Restriction

Young gamers in China have already found ways to circumvent the new restrictions placed on weekly playtime.

According to Chinese newspaper People’s Daily, the country’s gaming giant Tencent has now filed lawsuits against more than 20 different account trading platforms for renting out adult user accounts for Honor of Kings to children under the age of 18. New regulations kicked in on September 1 restricting players below that age to just three hours of game time a week, spread across three one-hour sessions on Friday, Saturday and Sunday in addition to public holidays. Those affected by the rules will only be allowed to play domestic games between the hours of 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. on those three days, creating massive spikes in traffic during that hour which have since caused login issues and crashed servers.

Part of the enforcement of the regulations came in the form of making players register will their real names and ages. The data will then be used to determine whether the restrictions would apply, but to circumvent this from happening, young gamers have been turning to websites that rent out adult accounts by the hour. As Kotaku reports, prices for these rentals start at roughly $5 USD for two hours of gameplay. However, there are still other measures that could potentially identify younger gamers. Back in the summer, Tencent launched a facial recognition program that could scan gamers’ faces to prevent younger gamers from posing as adults.

Elsewhere in gaming, Nintendo is reportedly bringing Game Boy titles to Switch Online.