Daniel Terdiman who blogs games for CNET suggests that China is going to be investing $1.8
billion on online games because they want a piece of that burgeoning market.
But we're a little more skeptical. The cynic in us says that this is all part of a master plan to fence off all of China's citizens inside a safe intranet zone that protects them from the unhealthy and shocking content to be found on the Internet.
Sure, it's nice and all that some 103 million Chinese game players spent about $483 million playing online games in the first half of 2005, but what we're guessing really matters to the Chinese government is that all of that money is spent on wholesome, government-sanctioned content, preferably stuff that doesn't encourage dangerous hobbies like voting.
Either way, $1.8 billion is a nice hunk of change. Whether it's spent over the next year or the next 10 years will be the real determinant of just how much change is in store for the Chinese game consumer.
