Beijing has condemned it as “poisonous”. The People’s Liberation Army weighed in to say it was sapping the might of the Chinese military. Parents added to the chorus of criticism when a 17-year-old boy suffered a stroke after playing the game nonstop for 40 hours. Honour of Kings is not just the world’s highest-grossing mobile game, with 200m registered users in China alone, it is also the subject of intense scrutiny.

Tencent, the maker of the fantasy role-playing game, responded by curbing the hours children could play — one hour a day for the under 12s and a two-hour maximum for those aged between 12 and 18 — after what appeared to be a co-ordinated attack by the authorities in July. About $15bn was lost off its market capitalisation. As for the children, many fired up fake IDs or borrowed those of their parents to get round the restrictions and feed their addiction.

But the move was more than a simple slap on the wrist for Tencent. It put the country’s tech giants on notice that their mostly unchecked ride to the top — Tencent and Alibaba rank alongside Facebook and Amazon in the world’s top 10 most valuable companies — can no longer count on a clear pass from Beijing. The tech groups have avoided heavier regulatory intervention in the past by adopting self-censorship and developing ties with the government. Regulators have typically only acted in response to a public backlash.