China Banning Genshin Impact?

Do gamers need to be worried about China Banning Genshin Impact? Read below for the latest info on the subject.

What Is The Chinese Gaming Crackdown?

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has recently announced they are implementing restrictions on game time for anyone 17 years of age or younger.

The new limit will be three hours a week, and only one-hour maximum per day. The specific window of time must fall between 8PM-9PM on either a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.

Enforcement of this will be the responsibility of game developers and publishers, who will have to resort to facial recognition in some cases, along with other ID mechanisms, though we have no doubt that workarounds will be found by some.

As one of the most popular games in China at the moment, particularly among younger gamers, these restrictions will doubtless impact the number of people playing Genshin Impact and also the revenue of the developers.

You can read more about all this in our Chinese Video Game Restrictions piece.

What Is Genshin Impact?

Genshin Impact is a free-to-play mobile game (also playable on PS4 and PC), which is basically a free-roaming RPG, inspired heavily by games such as Zelda: Breath Of The Wild and Nier: Automata.

Although the game has drawn criticism for its use of microtransactions and, rather heavy reliance on (a.k.a ripping off) the aforementioned influences, the fact that such an undeniably nice looking, feature-rich game is playable on a mobile phone is undoubtedly impressive, and has been a big reason for its huge success.

The developers of the game MiHoYo, are a Chinese company, and have quickly risen to the top of the pile of their national gaming industry.

The game has proven to be ridiculously popular both inside and outside of China. Earlier this year Genshin Impact had a reported 16 million registered users worldwide, a figure which no doubt increased since then. As of the end of April 2021, the game had made an estimated $874 million, and was making an additional $175 million per month. One of the co-founder’s of the company, Liu Wei, claimed that the game had a marketing and development budget of over $100 million!

How Likely Is A Genshin Impact Ban In China?

Based on what we currently know, it is unlikely that we will see Genshin Impact banned in China, at least any time soon.

As discussed, the Chinese crackdown on gaming is primarily focused on the number of hours played by people below a certain age, not targeting specific games themselves.

That being said, the CCP does have a strong inclination towards censorship of political, (homo)sexual, gory violence or even supernatural subjects (in films especially) that contravene its own narrative or standards of social acceptability – fortunately for Genshin players, Genshin Impact doesn’t really venture into any of these subjects.

Finally, as a game developed by a Chinese company, the developers of Genshin Impact will be more sensitive to the realities of Chinese state censorship, and additionally, are an example of a hugely successful Chinese cultural export that the government will probably think twice about crushing without mercy. So Genshin players are probably safe… for now.