system service exception gameloop tencent

System service exception gameloop tencent verification#

Tencent’s top fiveġ Honor of Kings (2015, £3.24bn) Tencent’s most profitable game, Honor of Kings, is a Moba, or “multiplayer online battle arena”. However, in a nation where children’s understanding of technology frequently outstrips that of their parents, the ability to know that such controls would be set centrally – and to have a cast-iron rebuttal to pester-power demands for one more round – could be appealing to some. Similarly, the idea of a time-limit on gaming is nothing new, and many services, from Apple’s iPhone to Nintendo’s Switch, contain built-in parental controls which allow parents and carers to limit children’s gaming. The systems would scan a user’s face to determine their age as part of the sign-up process for a social media, gaming or pornographic sites, developers such as Yoti suggest, which could be required to abide by the terms of the forthcoming Age Appropriate Design Code.

System service exception gameloop tencent verification#

Tencent’s launch of the “midnight patrol” system comes as British age verification providers are themselves gearing up to offer facial analysis-based online age checks. Since the censors rarely make exceptions for the intended age of the audience, instead preferring an approach that forces all media to be family-friendly, that has made it hard for western games to be adapted for the domestic market, and hard for Chinese developers to successfully export their creations.īut the focus on family-friendly gaming has also led to the Chinese state being held up as an unusually forward-thinking nation by some.

State censorship, for instance, is focused on not only politically inflammatory material, but frequently also acts against violent or sexual content. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship, since western developers are effectively locked out of China’s enormous player base unless they partner with a Chinese company, or are prepared to only access the much smaller number of Chinese gamers with access to imported consoles or VPN connections.Ĭhina’s government has shown no sign of demanding Tencent implement similar restrictions to its overseas properties, which already feature content unlikely to pass muster domestically.īeyond criticism of the addictive nature of the company’s games, Tencent also faces problems that are standard for many of the nation’s creative industries.

The investments provide more than just steady cashflow: Tencent typically has first refusal on adapting the titles for the Chinese market. It also owns ouright Riot Games, maker of League of Legends, and its most popular domestic title, Honor of Kings, is a thinly veiled clone of Riot’s own game – albeit one with 100 million daily players. The company owns 40% of Fortnite maker Epic Games, 81.4% of Clash of Clans company Supercell, and 5% of gaming giant Activision Blizzard, behind both World of Warcraft and Call of Duty. It has invested the windfall from that success in gaming properties, both domestic and international. The company’s roots lie in WeChat, a Chinese social media and messaging app that combines elements of Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and PayPal into an all-in-one experience that is the backbone of digital life for most of the country.

In an effort to stay ahead of the censors, Tencent has proposed going even further, suggesting the state should issue a complete ban on gaming for those under 12s, and announcing plans to work with its competition to tackle gaming addiction. Last month, the company rolled that technology out across 60 of its games. In 2018, it even began trialling a new technology it called the “midnight-patrol”: using facial recognition to identify young players trying to log-on to their accounts between 10 at night and 8am. Honor of Kings already limited the time young players could spend in-game, though with slightly more generous limits.