A contact at the law firm Clifford Chance in Shanghai informed Niko about a recent Ministry of Culture action that is noteworthy.  Essentially, the MOC has identified 39 games downloadable from websites, and the games need to be deleted. The reason it is noteworthy is not that the MOC has singled out 39 so-called violent games to ban. In Niko's view it is remarkable that the MOC has only identified 39 foreign single-player PC games to delete but states nothing about punishing the sites that illegally distribute these (and many other) games without any attribution or compensation to their rightful IP owners. This list of games clearly violates Chinese content law, and the publishers never attempted to get them approved. But rather than punish the source that brought them in illegally, they are just forcing the source to delete the games. Here is the text as translated by Clifford Chance:

  The Ministry of Culture ("MOC") has recently issued an internal reply to a local authority which is in charge of the enforcement of administrative laws in the culture market in Beijing ("Internal Reply").  Although the full text of this Internal Reply is not available to the public, we note that according to this Internal Reply, 39 games are defined as "illegal games" (containing violent content) and domestic Chinese websites shall delete these 39 banned games from their websites with a deadline of 21 April 2011.  If any website fails to do so, relevant administrative penalties will be imposed on it (it is not clear what kind of administrative penalties will be applied).  It is stated in the Internal Reply that these 39 games are defined as illegal because they have breached Article 9 of the Interim Regulations on Administration of Online Games which requires that online games shall not contain any content "disseminating or promoting obscene material, pornography, gambling, violence, or content instigating others to commit crimes."
  

A list of these 39 banned games is as follows:     

1. Call of Duty 2

2. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

3. Call of Duty 5: World at War

4. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

5. Shellshock: Nam '67

6. Shellshock 2: Blood Trails

7. Grand Theft Auto

8. Grand Theft Auto: London 1969 Villains

9. Grand Theft Auto 2

10. Grand Theft Auto 3

11. Grand Theft Auto: Advance

12. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

13. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

14. Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories

15. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories

16. Grand Theft Auto IV

17. Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

18. Grand Theft Auto: The Lost and Damned

19. Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad Of Gay Tony

20. Kane & Lynch: Dead Men

21. Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days

22. Mafia

23. Mafia II

24. Total Overdose

25. Saints Row

26. Saints Row 2

27. True Crime: New York City

28. True Crime: Streets of LA

29. Mercenaries

30. Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

31. 50 Cent: Bulletproof

32. 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand

33. The Godfather

34. The Godfather II

35. Scarface

36. Crackdown

37. Forbidden Siren

38. Forbidden Siren 2

39. Siren: New translation

In other news, RenRen.com, the largest "real name" SNS (as opposed to Tencent's Qzone, which utilizes gamers' QQ instant messenger user names) filed for IPO on the NYSE on April 15^th and has since caused a frenzy of stock prices in other Chinese Internet companies

Finally, Niko is hard at work finalizing our 2011 China's Games Industry Annual Review & Five-Year Forecast report, which will be published April 30^th as the cornerstone of our 2011 Chinese research subscription. Subscribe now so you can get it while its hot!