Report: China Lacks Games for Kids

If there’s one thing kids love, it’s video games. Unfortunately, lots of really fun video games aren’t particularly appropriate for kids, or so says a new report on China’s gaming industry released by the China Youth Internet Association and China Youth Net. The report sums up research conducted over the course of 2012 that looked at 423 games from major Chinese game publishers like Shanda, Tencent, Kingsoft, and Netease. It concludes that China doesn’t have enough games suitable for minors.

In total, the report found that 78.5 percent of the games researchers looked at weren’t suitable for minors, and less than 2 percent were suitable for kids six to twelve. Of course, what’s suitable for minors is subjective; this report classified games with violence, crime, simulated gambling situations, or player-killing to be unsuitable for kids (among other things).

China has long been troubled by how to handle its child gamers; just last month I wrote about how child gamers need a safe place to play games that can keep them out of sketchy internet cafes. Gaming addiction can be a serious problem, but it seems a more fundamental one might be that there aren’t enough games out there suitable for kids to play in the first place. And as the report points out, this appears to be a China-specific problem. Of the many Western games rated by the ESRB, only 9 percent aren’t suitable for minors, and 67 percent were suitable for anyone over age ten. That could be the result of differing standards — I get the impression that the Chinese games were judged a little more harshly — but it also points to a lack of kids games in China’s web games market.

That’s a social problem, but it’s also a potential opportunity for mobile and web game developers looking at the China market. China’s kid gaming population may not be as big a market as the market for adult games, but it’s also not as crowded, and many parents may be actively looking for games that aren’t full of sex, violence, and gambling for their kids to play.

(China Youth Internet Association Report via QQ Games, image source)