The Chinese government review of game content is pretty crazy, and it’s been true for a while now. 10+ years ago I worked for a couple (non-mobile) US-based game companies that were releasing games in China - one was Chinese owned and one Korean owned. Our Chinese parent company, which was owned by someone with government ties, apparently, told us, “Don’t worry about content, it’s not an issue.” Releasing a game via a Korean parent company, we had to be very careful to avoid certain content (we had a bunch of China-only replacement assets) and we still got rejected on the first pass for weirdly arbitrary reasons - we got a bunch of notes from the censors that basically amounted to, “I didn’t like this bit.” There’s clearly (at least) three levels of standards - one for foreign companies (the most restrictive), one for the average Chinese company, and one for the Chinese companies with connections.
What happened in 2021 is that, after a lot of criticism of - and restrictions on - games by the government, China stopped approving any games, even domestic ones, and only started again this year. A lot of Chinese developers closed as a result.
