China’s Ministry of Culture has ordered some 27 mobile phone platforms, including Baidu and Android, to clean up their content in a broad crackdown on applications offering gambling-related purchases.
The ministry is honing in on lottery-style in-app purchases that increase a player’s chances of winning or receiving a reward, a tool that could be perceived as promoting gambling.
Twenty companies have thus far submitted reports to the ministry about 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 failed to make corrections and have received administrative penalties.
China’s market for mobile games generated the equivalent of US$2.24 billion in revenue last year, a year-on-year increase of 112.6 percent, 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. These will include a manual detailing irregularities in in-app purchases and a blacklist of companies found advocating gambling and other content the government considers offensive.
