China forbids images of dead bodies and pools of blood in games

Tough times are coming for Chinese players with love for brutal, gory games. Or, in fact, any game whatsoever where a pool of blood is found or a body lying down on the floor.

These are just a few of the new guidelines by China's State Administration of Press and Publication (SAPP) (via PCGamesN) to be approved this month. It enforces a committee of game experts and scholars to ensure that “certain games abide by the social values that China holds dear.”

The new guidelines will also limit the number of games that receive a license each year. This isn't as bad as it sounds, since it mainly targets “low quality copycat games, which currently flood the market, as well as poker and mah-jong games that have been targeted in governmental enforcement over the past year.”

Mini games and HTML5 games such as the ones that you usually play in a browser, without the need to download a client, didn't need to apply for approval. From now on they will have to.

As for the big topic from this post, it states the following: “There shall be no images of dead bodies or pools of blood in any games.” Sounds pretty transparent and somewhat drastic, going to the extent of forbidding developers from changing the blood color to circumvent the issue – this was a tactic that was widely used years ago, especially in Germany.