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BEIJING, January 18 (TMTPOST) —— 88 China-made online games were licensed by the National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA), including titles from Tencent, NetEase, and miHoYo.

On the back of the news, A shares and Hong Kong shares of the game sector surged on Wednesday. Giant Network, Kingnet, and 37 Interactive Entertainment led the rise, with their shares rising more than 5%.

This is the eighth batch of games to be approved since the original batch was restored in April 2022, just 20 days after the previous batch was issued on December 28, 2022.

Big names including the industry leaders Tencent Holdings and NetEase were also among the ones who received licenses for their games. The two giants received game licenses for the third consecutive month, indicating that China"s long-running freeze on new gaming approvals may finally have thawed.

Undawn, an open-world survival game developed by Tencent"s LightSpeed Studios, and Alchemy Stars, a role-playing mobile game developed by the tech giant"s subsidiary Tourdog Studio, as well as a new mobile game from the company called Yuanmengzhixing, made it to the list of licensed games. Badlanders, NetEase’s shooting title also won approval, with more than 10 million reservations on the website.

Game practitioners generally hope that the approval of games can follow the previous rhythm of "one batch per month", but some senior executives of listed game companies said that "in fact, there is no regulation that the license must be released once a month, and it is still uncertain whether the "one batch per month" cycle will be followed."

In 2022, both the revenue and users of the Chinese game market shrank, with the sales revenue of the mobile game market declining by 14.4% year on year. The actual sales revenue of China"s game market in 2022 was 265.884 billion yuan ($39.25 billion), down 10.33% year on year, and the number of game users was 664 million, down 0.33% year-on-year, according to a report released by Gamma Data last Friday.