14 DAY TRIAL // The Chinese government announces that it has plans to allow both the manufacture and the sale of home gaming consoles in more regions around the country, after an experimental phase, which was confined to the Shanghai free-trade zone, was apparently deemed to be a success.
The central bureaucracy now wants local governments to plan for the possibility by drafting a set of rules and then submitting them to the Ministry of Commerce, and there are also other procedures that need to be approved, linked to custom and foreign currency exchange rules.
Given the complexity of the situation, it’s unclear when home consoles like the Xbox One from Microsoft, the PlayStation 4 from Sony and the Wii U from Nintendo might be sold in new regions inside China.
The new rules might mean increased sales for the gaming sector in the country, which is one of the markets with the biggest future potential.
VG247 says that the Chinese Ministry of Culture will still need to approve all the content that it launched on the devices in China, which means that a relatively limited number of titles can be launched.
Xbox One sales in China are limited at the moment
For the time being, the Xbox One from Microsoft is the current-gen console that is being actively sold in the country and the company has not offered information on the actual number of platforms it has moved to players.
Only a limited number of games are available for it.
Sony had plans to introduce the PlayStation 4 in January but it has postponed the launch date because of unspecified reasons, with sources claiming that there were problems with the titles the company wanted to sell.
Chinese companies are also interested in creating gaming consoles in order to take advantage of the big market, but most players in the country are interested in PC-based free-to-play titles and in mobile gaming.
China has a big population and a growing middle-class, which makes it a territory with a lot of long-term potential.
But it seems that at the moment the Communist government needs to loosen its restrictions in order to create an environment which encourages further investment from the likes of Sony and Microsoft.
