GDC China takes place in Shanghai this weekend, Dec 5-6. This year's event is expected to draw a larger crowd than past years, with many interesting speakers.

More regulations are coming your way in China. This time it is a set of national standards for game classification, coding and quality evaluation. It seems no platform is exempt from the new standards board, including console games. This marks a momentous event because no regulatory body has been tasked with approval of console games. Consoles are still technically banned under a policy promulgated in the year 2000 initially intended to restrict the sale of video arcade machines, and later extended to include game consoles. Now that consoles will have standards, we presume that the consoles and games will also be regulated and perhaps that ban will finally be revised.

Tencent announced it will open it's platform to developers and it will cooperate with partners rather than trying to go it alone for the entire online ecosystem. The company's CEO, Ma Huateng, said that they are also considering opening up the QQ platform to developers and smaller websites that have trouble finding large enough audiences to whom to market their worthwhile products and services. Tencent is the largest Internet company in China and the 3^rd largest in the world, and this decision may indicate the ushering in of a new era for growth and cooperation.