Animal Crossing is now banned in China

It's has been almost three weeks since the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons and the game has proven to be an enormous success. Fans all around the world are finding their escape from the cruel reality of the real world pandemic by playing Animal Crossing and enjoying on their safe little islands. 

The game sold more than 2.6 million physical copies in its first ten days on sale just in Japan, making it the biggest single Switch game launch in the country, by breaking the record held by Pokémon Sword and Shield. Succes was similar in the other regions too.

• Read more: Switch almost sells out worldwide, but Nintendo insists more units are on the way

In China, the game was not officially released yet, since it has yet to be approved by Chinese authorities. Still, it was already available via Chinese online shops like Taobao and Pinduoduo, while some Chinese players were simply switching region on the Nintendo eShop in order to buy the game. The game was very popular in China too, and it helped many Chinese to cope with the quarantine and crisis resulted from COVID-10 pandemic. Some teachers in China even used the game as a way to teach their students online.

But yesterday, all of a sudden, the game simply disappeared from all online shops in China, without any official statement from authorities. And not just the game, but listings where Chinese players were selling in-game items and currency have also disappeared.

Speculations are that the reason behind it lies in Hong Kong protesters who are using the game as a way of sending messages against the Chinese government and supporting the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, like Joshua Wong, who is a prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy activist. Report from The News Lens says that it's also used to "design 'funerals' featuring Xi Jinping's headshots".

• Read more: Top 10 incredibly long games to play during lockdown

The government of China is rigorous when it comes to game regulations, anything that that can go against the Party, leadership, national pride and security, social norms, etc.. will be banned from China without mercy. In practice, this gives significant freedom to the Communist Party of China (CPC) to regulate the video game market and to ban anything it finds threatening for the regime.