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Google already offers parents and guardians tools to restrict purchases their children make on Play Store using the family payment method. The company is now introducing an additional feature that will allow children to send a purchase request for the manager of the family account to approve when there is no present payment method.

Children can ask for approval for both paid apps and in-app purchase when the family hasn’t set up a payments method. Once the family manager gets this request through a notification (or in their request queue), they can use their own payment method including Google Play gift cards to approve the request and make the purchase. The manager can look at these requests under pending and history tabs.

This method works best when you want to have full control over your children’s purchases and family spending. You can see all apps and in-app purchases children are interacting with and decline the ones that you think are harmful — or not necessary for whatever reason.

Google has introduced a number of changes in recent months to put better oversight on how children interact with its services. In October, the company rolled out a redesigned Family Link app with highlights, controls, and location tabs alongside granting it a web version. Last month, it announced policy tweaks for the Play Store, making the requirements for an app to be certified as a “kids” app stricter.

Google Play now lets children send purchase requests to guardians by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

The Indian central bank’s governor said on Wednesday that it’s not at war with crypto, but asserted that cryptocurrencies have no underlying fundamentals and their usage should be prohibited.

RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das told a room packed with banking executives and lawmakers that crypto has a huge inherent risk to the macroeconomic and stability of the nation. “After the development of the last one year, including the latest episode surrounding FTX, I don’t think we need to say anything more. Time has proven that crypto is worth what it’s worth today.”

“Change in value in any so-called product is the function of the market. But unlike any other asset or product, our main concern with crypto is that it doesn’t have any underlying whatsoever. I think crypto or private cryptocurrency is a fashionable way of describing what is otherwise a 100% speculative activity,” said Das.

Das said crypto owes its origin to the idea that it bypasses or breaks the existing financial system. “They don’t believe in the central bank, they don’t believe in a regulated financial world. I’m yet to hear a good argument about what public purpose it serves,” he said, adding that he holds the view that crypto should be prohibited.

“It should be prohibited because if it is allowed to grow … say it’s regulated and allowed to grow … please mark my words that the next financial crisis will come from private cryptocurrencies,” he said.

India is among the nations that has taken a stringent approach at handling cryptocurrencies. Earlier this year, it began taxing virtual currencies, levying a 30% tax on the gains and a 1% deduction on each crypto transaction.

The nation’s move, alongside the market downturn, has severely depleted the transactions local exchanges CoinSwitch Kuber, backed by Sequoia India and Andreessen Horowitz, and CoinDCX, backed by Pantera, process in the nation.

Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, founder and chief executive of the world’s largest crypto exchange Binance, told TechCrunch in a recent interview that the firm doesn’t see India as a “very crypto-friendly environment.” He said the firm is attempting to relay its concerns to the local authority about the local taxation, but asserted that tax policies typically take a long time to change.

“Binance goes to countries where regulations are pro-crypto and pro-business. We don’t go to countries where we won’t have a sustainable business — or any business, regardless of whether or not we go,” he said.

Coinbase, which has backed both CoinDCX and CoinSwitch Kuber, launched its crypto platform in the country earlier this year butquickly rolled back the service amid a regulatory scare. Coinbase co-founder and chief executive Brian Armstrong said in May that the firm disabled Coinbase’s support for local payments infra UPI “because of someinformal pressure from the [central bank] Reserve Bank of India.”

“Crypto closed 2021 with the narrative that finance as we know it was slow, inefficient and clumsy. Defi and DAOs were the path forward. Crypto prices, in their own jargon, were mooning and investors were HODLing. Since May 2022, cryptos have lost some of the shine — two-thirds of the value. Failure of some entities have caused the ecosystem to unravel,” T. Rabi Sankar, Deputy Governor of RBI, who once likened crypto to tulip and Ponzi scheme, said Wednesday.

“The technology that was heralded as the end of government, and regulators and intermediaries — the underlying philosophy of crypto — is now frantically seeking to be regulated,” he said.

India central bank chief warns crypto will cause the next financial crisis if permitted to grow by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, foreigners have been leaving China in droves to escape the country’s strict “zero-COVID” restrictions, which had limited people’s domestic and overseas travel for nearly three years until rules began to relax recently. So when NetEase, the second-largest gaming company in China, said it had an expats-led studio working on a game out of Shanghai for the last three years, I was a bit surprised.

Helmed by lead producer Oscar Lopez and creative director Eve Jobse, Miaozi launched its first title globally on Steam last Friday. Called Cygnus Enterprise, the game, in the studio’s own words, is a “cross-genre single-player sci-fi game for PC that puts the player in charge of an outpost on an alien planet” and “alternates between small-scale city management and action RPG gameplay.”

Both NetEase and its rival Tencent have been placing more focus on overseas expansion as regulatory clampdowns hamper their domestic success. Aside from acquiring small Western studios, the two Chinese titans have been recruiting international talent. Tencent’s most lucrative studio TiMi kicked off its North America operation in early 2020 and its internal rival (the firm is known for encouraging in-house competition) Lightspeed similarly set up shop in LA this year. NetEase also opened its first US studio in Austin this May.

While the months-long lockdown in Shanghai this spring drove many foreigners to exit China, Miaozi’s international employees stayed put and found the situation had little impact on their work.

“Luckily for us, it worked really well,” Lopez said in an interview with TechCrunch. “We didn’t leave China during COVID times. China was a really safe environment to be in, and we basically focused on our development. The company and our team had all the infrastructure needed to develop from home in case it was needed at some point.”

“You can develop anywhere in the world,” he continued. “It’s better if you’re face to face, of course; it’s always easier to engage in communication and solve problems. But the truth is that [the pandemic] didn’t affect us much.”

The naming of the studio speaks to the team’s affinity for China. Miaozi is short for the sound of cats, “meow”, and “baozi”, a type of soft, fluffy, filled bun that’s common in China — two things that the team of 50 employees loves.

“Downstairs around the office, there’s a convenience store FamilyMart, and what people often get during lunchtime are these baozi, and everyone love these baozi,” Jobse explained affectionately the daily routine familiar to those who have worked in Shanghai. “But they also love cats. There’re a lot of street cats there outside and people pat them and feed them food.”

“We wanted to have something that is kind of cross-culture and loved by everyone, and something that Chinese and the rest of the people in the team would understand,” Jobse added.

In designing the game, the creative director sought inspiration from Chinese science fiction, which generally conveys a more uplifting message than their Western counterparts — the government has been encouraging “positive energy” in news, arts, and culture rather than cynical, negative sentiments in recent years.

“We’ve been able to make a science fiction game that is both innovative and also positive,” noted Jobse. “Science fiction IPs right now are very, very focused on the negative and the dangers of space or the dangers of alien creatures.”

She went on to reference the influence of The Wandering Earth, a blockbuster Chinese sci-fi film loosely based on a short story by Liu Cixin, the author of The Three-Body Problem.

“It’s actually quite a lot of inspirational little details that [we] could take from. For example, The Wandering Earth really has this whole spirit of collaboration and working together [to] overcome this obstacle… Even if they’re from different cultures or different backgrounds, they want to work together to achieve a common goal.”

As with a lot of other industries, the development of China’s gaming sector is shaped by foreign investments and partnerships. International gaming publishers coveted China’s rapidly growing internet population, and Chinese gaming firms were eager to learn from their more established Western peers. NetEase itself has a long history of working with foreign publishers — last month marked the end of its 14-year licensing deal with Blizzard Activision to operate the latter’s games in China.

Cutthroat competition in the Chinese market has given rise to a generation of internet firms that puts emphasis on short-term earnings over long-term innovations. It’s a delicate balance. Lopez reckoned that his team has a high degree of creative freedom as long as certain expectations are met. “Within our studio where we produce games, we are objective-oriented. We are meant to produce a game within time and budget. In those boundaries is where our freedom lies,” he said.

As expats fled China’s zero-COVID, this developer built a sci-fi game for NetEase by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch