Chinese video game companies expect commercial approvals for new titles to gradually resume from next month, ending a nine month freeze which hit growth at internet giant Tencent and other publishers in the world’s biggest gaming market.
Chinese regulators stopped approving commercial licenses for games in late March of this year, as part of a government shake-up that folded the country’s top media regulator into the ruling Communist party’s propaganda department.
Feng Shixin, a senior propaganda department official, told a conference in the southern province of Hainan on Friday that a first batch of approvals for games had been completed, without specifying when publication licenses would be awarded.