Guigang City Slaps Gaming Company With 120M Yuan Fine, Claims 'Our City Has Players' — Company Fires Back: You Have No Jurisdiction!

A gaming company gets slapped with a 120-million-yuan fine by a culture bureau in a city hundreds of kilometers away, plus 285 PCs confiscated. The company's response? 'You have no jurisdiction over us.' The bureau's comeback? 'We have players in our city.'

The Guigang City Bureau of Culture, Radio, Television, Sports and Tourism in Guangxi recently published three administrative penalty decisions targeting three companies: Guilin Yunmeng Interactive, Nanning Xingji Yunyou, and Guigang Juwan Tianxia. Xingji Yunyou got hit hardest — 20.77 million yuan in illegal gains confiscated, a staggering fine of 103.87 million yuan, plus 285 computer towers and 298 monitors seized. According to 21st Century Business Herald, insiders say this may be the largest penalty of its kind in China's gaming history.

So what did these companies actually do? The story centers on an online game called "Yu Long Shi Tian" (御龙弑天, roughly 'Slayer of Dragon and Heaven'). The copyright belongs to Shanghai Yuanqi Network Technology, with Shanghai Tongji University Electronic Audio-Visual Press as the publisher. In 2018, the game was licensed to Shanghai Xiyou Network Technology, but after the license expired, no one bothered to re-register with the National Press and Publication Administration. Then Hunan Paoku Interactive struck a joint-operations deal with Yunmeng Interactive, quietly shifting who controlled the game.

Here's where it gets spicy: between June 2021 and June 2022, Xingji Yunyou and Yunmeng took the original game and slapped eight different suffixes onto its name — creating variants like 'Yu Long Shi Tian: Sword Duel,' 'Reincarnation,' 'Red Lotus Shatter,' and five more. These reskinned versions launched on two gaming platforms with full services: user registration, game downloads, in-game top-ups, and promotional campaigns. In June 2022, Guangxi's press and publication bureau officially ruled all eight versions illegal publications.

The real controversy isn't about whether the companies broke the law — it's about who gets to punish them. None of the three companies are registered in Guigang. The game wasn't developed or published there either. The Guigang bureau justified its jurisdiction by arguing that 'the illegal games had players in our city,' which constitutes a 'result of illegal activity' within their territory under China's Administrative Penalty Law. They also noted that Nanning and Guilin didn't contest jurisdiction, and they'd received approval from the autonomous region's culture and tourism department.

Legal experts are sharply divided. Zhu Junchao, founding partner at Kinding Law Firm and head of Nuocheng Game Law, told 21st Century Business Herald that operating games with borrowed or expired license numbers is indeed 'a fatal mistake' — once caught, the product gets axed. However, he also warned that allowing local governments to enforce penalties far outside their region creates a 'jurisdiction-grab' problem driven by profit motives, which would seriously damage the business environment. He argued that game industry violations should be handled by regulators in the company's home jurisdiction.

The NGA comments section is predictably split. The top-voted comment cuts straight to the bone: 'Guigang is strapped for cash right now, and here comes a golden goose on a silver platter.' Others took a more law-and-order stance: 'The evidence of illegal publication is crystal clear — they had it coming.'

One commenter nailed the systemic issue: 'With administrative penalties, it's first-come-first-served — whoever files first gets the prize. If cross-regional enforcement becomes the norm, we're in for some wild times.' Others worried about a new phenomenon of 'preemptive punishment' — companies cozying up to local authorities to get lightly fined first, shielding themselves from harsher penalties elsewhere. A more level-headed voice countered: 'Guilin and Nanning didn't even object. If they thought this money was theirs, they would've fought for it already.'

The companies are reportedly preparing administrative appeals and lawsuits. But the bigger question looms: if a small city's culture bureau can drop a nine-figure fine on a company hundreds of kilometers away just because 'we have players here,' and this playbook gets widely copied, China's gaming industry might be headed for an all-out jurisdictional free-for-all.