China has expanded its list of things to make pure for its citizens. In addition to crackdowns on search engine results and pornography sites, China announced a new initiative called the “China Green Online Games Publishing Program.” CGOGPP will act as the red tape for online games that want to make it on the Chinese market. If CGOGPP decides that the game you submitted violates its policies, it will be illegal for you to release it online. The goal of the initiative is to “clean up” the video game market, which Chinese officials claim is largely populated by products which suck in players to make an unlawful profit.
This isn’t really a surprising move on China’s part. Recently, they’ve been more and more concerned with what people are doing online. The country shut down Twitter a few weeks back to keep some riots on the down low, and that’s definitely a step beyond passing laws to determine what sort of content is allowed to see the light of day.
While Chinese officials have yet to define what it means for a game to be “green” and thus pass inspection, it’s probably a safe bet that there won’t be any hard list of guidelines games must follow. CGOGPP is probably going to be the App Store for games in China – if the government doesn’t like your product for whatever reason, they’re going to kick it out. This is a huge blow against the expansion of capitalism in China. Games like Grand Theft Auto exist because there are markets for them. The Chinese government is attempting to deny those by not allowing products satisfying these demands to go on sale. It may suck, but such is the cost of doing business in China.
