The end of China’s ban on video game consoles won’t change anything

• Chinese consumers don’t generally pay for software. At most, they pay for a certain period of play, such as in a gaming parlour, or they play free games.
• Relatedly, more hardcore gamers are already used to playing on PCs in internet cafes. These players may not be able to afford consoles, but they can afford the hourly rates associated with such cafes.
• The dominant form of gaming is on mobile phones, which are now powerful enough to compete with consoles for at least the casual games. (Indeed, China’s Snail OS has built an entire business—and a mobile network—on mobile gamers alone.)
• Chinese developers don’t have much experience making console games, and nor do they much incentive to learn, for the reasons cited above.
• The same applies to non-Chinese developers, thinks the analysts at Macquarie, who say that “Western and Japanese pubs unlikely to make games that appeal to Chinese gamers.”
• And the Chinese government will maintain its censorship of certain types of video games, regardless of whether consoles are legal or not. This is in keeping with the government’s policy of enforcing strict moral codes on the media.

In short, says Macquarie, the answer to the question of what impact this will have for large gaming firms like Electronic Arts $EA, “the answer is, unfortunately, very little… at least for now.”