Researchers question the effectiveness of China’s game time restrictions for minors in reducing heavy play

Children in mainland China are subject to some of the world’s strictest restrictions on online gaming time, but a new study published in Nature found no evidence that those government-imposed rules had reduced heavy gaming.

Researchers from universities in the UK and Denmark pulled anonymised data from US game engine developer Unity, covering 7.04 billion hours of playtime from 2.4 billion mainland Chinese gamer profiles from August 2019 to January 2020.