You might recall that 2018 proved to be a mess for studios trying to get their new games approved for the always-lucrative Chinese market. Due to a shift in the government’s structure, the process for game evaluation and license approval got frozen for what started out as months and ended up the better part of the entire year.
While the freeze finally thawed last December, the considerable logjam of titles that built up over 2018 has overwhelmed the governmental agency tasked with evaluating all of them. This has led to yet another freeze which has gone into place this month in order to allow the regulators time to get the mess sorted out. Of course, that won’t stop publishers from submitting even more titles, so clearing out this backlog might be a neverending process.
Gamasutra reports that since the previous freeze lifting, China approved over 350 games, including those from mega-publishers like Tencent and NetEase. The new freeze is worrying companies, as no profits can be attained from games being held in bureaucratic limbo.
