China’s Ministry of Culture has ordered some 27 mobile phone platforms, including Baidu and Android, to clean up their act as part of a broad crackdown on applications offering gambling-related content.
The ministry is honing in on lottery-style in-app purchases that increase a game player’s chances of winning or receiving a reward, a marketing tool that could be perceived as promoting gambling.
Twenty of the companies have responded to the order with reports detailing corrections they have made in their apps or games, including deleting information that pertains to gambling and/or canceling lottery-style in-app purchasing. The remaining seven have received administrative penalties.
China’s mobile games industry generated US$2.24 billion in revenue last year, a year-on-year increase of 112%, according to government data. The country now has 170 million users of offline mobile games and 120 million of online games.
Li Gang, an official with the ministry, said the size of the market is making it increasingly hard to supervise, but he said further actions will be taken, including publication of a manual on irregularities in in-app purchases and regular updates to a blacklist of companies found advocating gambling and other content the government considers offensive.
