US tech giant Epic Games Inc has said it would shut down its popular survival game Fortnite in China, months after authorities imposed a series of strict curbs on the world’s biggest gaming market as part of a sweeping crackdown on the technology sector.
“Fortnite China’s Beta test has reached an end, and the servers will be closed soon,” Epic Games said in a statement. “On Nov. 15 at 11am, we will turn off game servers, and players will no longer be able to log in.”
Hong Kong-listed shares of Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊), which has a large stake in Epic, were down yesterday.
The move brings an end to a long-running test of Epic’s version of Fortnite specifically created for the Chinese market, where content is policed for excessive violence.
The Chinese test version was released in 2018, but Fortnite never received the government’s green light for a formal launch as approvals for new games slowed.
The action-packed shooter and world-building game is one of the most popular in the world, boasting more than 350 million users — more than the population of the US.
Epic is the second US-based company to pull a popular product from China in recent weeks, after Microsoft Corp announced last month that it would close its career-oriented social network LinkedIn Inc.
In September, hundreds of Chinese video game makers, including Tencent, vowed to better police their products for “politically harmful” content and enforce curbs on underage players, as they looked to fall in line with government demands.
The 213 gaming firms promised in a joint statement to ban content that was “politically harmful, historically nihilistic, dirty and pornographic, bloody and terrifying.”
Chinese gaming firms have also been ordered by regulators to stop focusing on profit and gaining fans, with enterprises that are seen as flouting rules threatened with punishment.
The announcement about Fortnite was met with sadness from fans in China, who took to social media to mourn the loss of the game.
“I’m genuinely crying so hard — I was just playing with my boyfriend and was really looking forward to what was coming next,” one Sina Weibo user wrote. “This is just so sudden.”
Many said they had poured hundreds of hours into building up their characters and social networks on the game.
Multiple Fortnite fan accounts on Sina Weibo shared a link to a petition where players urged Epic to transfer players’ data to servers outside China, writing that they would lose the gaming data with “our heart and mind” stored in it.
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