PUBG, Fortnite, Paladins and more to be banned in China

The Chinese government recently established its Online Ethics Review Committee, which was tasked with reviewing online games to check whether they met with the country’s social and ethical norms. A batch of 20 games were the first to go through the review process, of which 9 failed and will supposedly be straight up banned in the country. The remaining will require corrective action.

The list features a mix of titles popular just in China, and games that are hugely popular with Western audiences as well, such as most of Blizzard’s titles, PUBG, League of Legends and Fortnite.

League of Legends, Diablo, World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Tencent’s mobile MOBA Arena of Valor, and NCSOFT’s MMORPG Blade & Soul were some of the titles that require “Corrective action” to meet with the review boards requirements. Pretty much all of them seem to have “inharmonious chatrooms” among other things. We’re guessing that’s just a nice way to say toxic chat? Or lack of chat moderation? We don’t know. You can take a look at the whole list on this reddit thread, including the original post.

Overwatch also had a reason citing “game visuals promote incorrect values” slapped on it. No clue what exactly this pertains to. Going further down the list, you have the 9 games that are banned, featuring just about every popular battle royale currently in existence. This includes PUBG, Fortnite, H1Z1, Paladins, Tencent’s Ring of Elysium, and Free Fire Battlegrounds among others.

The common cause for ban for all of the above is “Blood and gore”. It should be noted that neither of those are in Fortnite. Well, at least there’s no blood anyway, last we checked. The same appears to be the case with Paladins, Hi-Rez’s shooter, which didn’t have any blood.

It should also be noted that a lot of the games on the list are NetEase or Tencent operated in China, so they’ve been hit pretty hard here. NetEase handles Blizzard operation in the country.

Interestingly, CS:GO was not in this list, but it might be in the next batch of games to be reviewed, who knows. We don’t know if the ban has been put into action yet, but it’ll be interesting to see how this affects global player counts.

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