Region-free console gaming is not going to happen in China. Period.

Last week, news broke that unlike Microsoft’s Xbox One, the Playstation 4 and PS Vita would not be region-locked when they were released in China this week. I was away on paternity leave, but with one eye on the baby and one eye on the news, I was surprised to see that a lot of gaming media outlets ran the story. My gut response was that there was no way it could be true.

So I wasn’t surprised at all to see that just two days later, the China PS4 launch was postponed “indefinitely” due to “various factors” involving the Chinese government. Even less surprising: over the weekend a source at Shanghai Media Group, Sony’s local partner for the PS4 launch, told Asian gaming site Haogamers that the lack of a region-lock is indeed the reason the PS4’s launch had been delayed.

See: China’s PS4 is going to be just as bad as its Xbox One

Look: a region-free console is not going to happen in China, full stop. China’s Ministry of Culture is dedicated to approving the content of every game Chinese console gamers can play. That’s why the launch lineups for both the Xbox One and the PS4 in China were so thin and weak: the approval process takes time and there are a lot of things the Ministry doesn’t allow in video games.

If the PS4 was region-free, Chinese gamers could play any game they wanted, not just the games that have been approved for release by the Ministry of Culture. Games containing objectionable political content – like the popular Battlefield 4, which China banned a year ago – could be easily imported from Taiwan or Hong Kong and played on official Chinese Playstation 4 consoles. The Ministry of Culture’s approval process could and would be very easily circumvented so that Chinese gamers could play non-approved games on their officially-approved consoles.

Games like Battlefield are already available on China’s gray market, of course, but they’re only playable on illegal gray-market machines. Allowing them to be played on officially-approved consoles would be tantamount to announcing that the Ministry of Culture has given up trying to censor video games, and that’s certainly not the case. The government may not yet have a specific rule requiring region-locking, but it has made it very clear that it must approve all game content released for consoles, and there’s little chance it would allow Sony to skirt that rule so easily.

In short, a region-free console would lead to a de facto lack of censorship of game content, and that’s something that China’s Ministry of Culture will not accept. Nothing official has been announced yet, of course, but when China’s PS4 does finally launch, don’t expect it to be region-free. As much as we might want that, it’s simply not going to happen.