China's tech crackdown is creating a gloomy outlook even for titans like Tencent

According to the experts Barron's interviewed, the Chinese gaming industry-especially its biggest companies like Tencent and NetEase-is struggling under Beijing's approvals process for new game releases, which was recently frozen for eight months. The last year has also seen China impose new restrictions on the time that under-18s can spend playing online games and tighter censorship of in-game content, making it harder for the country's games industry to operate at home. Even more alarming for China's most recognisable game companies is that the vast majority of those approvals were given to relatively small game devs and publishers; NetEase and Tencent remain iced out. Barron's spoke to business professor Nir Kshetri, who explained that the government's unwillingness to approve licensed foreign games and "Hardcore" games "Somewhat explains rush into overseas markets". Although the other expert Barron's spoke to-Daniel Ahmad of Niko Partners-predicted that the pressure on Tencent and NetEase would ease up in future batches of game approvals, it hardly seems surprising that those companies are focusing on overseas markets like the US. Meanwhile, Chinese games companies that don't have the resources of a gargantuan multinational have simply given up and closed down over the past year, the report says. The situation does not appear to have become more favorable for small studios over the past two years, but the good news is that the introduction of Steam China has not ended the Chinese public's ability to access to Steam's global client as feared, and we continue to see interesting games from China appear on the global Steam store. In April, Steam ran a week-long event highlighting games from China.