China’s gaming regulator on Monday granted publishing licenses for 45 games belonging to the likes of Baidu and XD’s Party Star, ending a nine-month-long freeze that has shocked many of the country’s tech giants.
The National Press and Public Administration published the list on their website. Reuters reported that China had licensed XD Party Star earlier in the day.
Other companies whose games were licensed include eyedreamsky37Game, G-Bits Network Technology is a subsidiary of Xiamen, Shenzhen ZakGame and Yuzu GamesList shown.
US-listed shares of Chinese gaming firms net ease And bilibili Premarket trading jumped 8 percent and 8.6 percent, respectively.
Chinese regulators stopped approving game monetization licenses in July last year, overwhelming the likes of industry giants Tencent Holdings and NetEase and putting thousands of firms in the industry out of business.
The pause coincided with a move by China in August to impose new gaming deadlines for under-18s, a stringent social intervention it said was needed to pull the plug on a growing addiction described as “spiritual opium”.
The freeze was nearly as long as an earlier suspension in 2018 when China stopped approving new video game titles over a nine-month period as part of an overhaul of regulatory bodies overseeing the sector.
© Thomson Reuters 2022