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July 3, 2017

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Parents win a result in addictive game

TENCENT announced yesterday that it will limit the daily time for youngsters to play its popular King of Glory game after parents and schools in Shanghai and other areas complained their children had become addicted to playing it.

From tomorrow, children younger than 12 will only be allowed to play the game for a maximum of one hour a day, and after 9pm, they will be banned from logging into it, said Tencent. Juveniles older than 12 will be able to play a maximum two hours a day.

The game system will remind players the time they have been playing and young players will be forced to log out when the time is up.

Tencent claimed these were the most strict measures in China’s game industry to prevent addiction and the company expected they would ease parents’ anxiety.

There have been several cases reported that children had spent too much money — as well as time — on King of Glory, Tencent said it will add a new function to limit spending of juvenile players. The company also said it had updated its system for parents to monitor children using its games.

Since February, parents can receive messages when children log in and spend money on the game after they connect children’s game accounts with their mobile phone numbers.

Now, parents can connect phones, tablets or computers that their children use to play games, so that they can always keep an eye on the children even if they have several game accounts, Tencent said. It added the measure covered its 200 games, and about 700,000 accounts have been connected to parents’ phone numbers.

Song Zhe, a father of a Shanghai high school student, welcomed the measures but was not sure if they would be sufficiently effective.

“I like the system that could lock up the devices as children can register many accounts,” he said.

“But children are so clever that they can always think out counter measures.”


 

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