Tencent a Winner as China Relaxes Game Rules
China has granted tech giant Tencent Holdings Limited (TCEHY) its first license for a video game in 18 months, ending a dry spell that had threatened its position as the world's top game maker.
Beijing moved against the country's vibrant gaming sector last year as part of a sprawling crackdown on big tech companies, including a cap on the amount of time children could spend playing games.
Officials also froze approvals of new titles for nine months until April.
China's gaming regulator, the National Press and Publication Administration, on Thursday said it had approved 70 new titles in November including Tencent's action game "Metal Slug: Awakening" and a role-playing game "Journey to the West: Return" by rival NetEase.
Gaming licences are mandatory for video games to be published and sold in the Chinese market.
The last time Tencent obtained a major license was in May 2021.
A Tencent subsidiary received a licence in September but it was for a free educational game.
Shares of the Hong Kong-listed company edged up 0.5 percent in early trade on Friday after the licensing announcement, while NetEase gained five percent.
The approval signals a relaxing of China's strict attitude towards tech companies.
During the tech crackdown, hundreds of game makers pledged to scrub "politically harmful" content from their products and enforce curbs on underage players in a bid to comply with government demands.
Strict restrictions announced last year allow players under the age of 18 to play for three hours a week.
AI is the Neat Handwriting of the Illiterate
A model in the hands of someone who has read the filing and walked the plant is a clerk. The same model, speaking for someone who has done neither, is a disguise. On AI slop, phantom citations and factslop, why finish stopped being evidence of work, and the containment layer KXCO built so a machine cannot speak as the institution until a source is attached.
Worthship: Do Not Conform to the Age
Worthship is the older English word for worship, and it means to ascribe worth. Bishop Robert Barron preached Romans 12 on 30 August. This essay follows the text into the prison letters, and puts two questions to a graph: do the four readings of that Sunday agree, and was Paul free or in chains when he wrote about despair?
The Truth in All Its Ugliness Must Survive
A majority vote does not determine the truth. Consensus is a mood, gossip is a sport, and a model will write the pretty version for free. Why the ugly number has to survive, why a record beats a dashboard, and what KXCO was built to keep standing when the room changes its mind.
Don't Be the Best, Be the Only: Winning in an AI World
AI is repricing competence downward. What it cannot reproduce is a life. The case for remaining non-fungible, why friction still produces the best ideas, and what it means to build AI systems that keep the human intellect in them.
Every story, signed and delivered.
Subscribe to the kxco channel and get the headline, the AI-written key takeaways, and the chain-anchor link the moment we publish. Audio versions and per-ticker subscriptions arrive in the next iteration.