Gaming Giant Epic Pulls Out Of Fortnite China Due To Raid
American tech giant Epic Games has announced that it will discontinue its popular survival game Fortnite in China, months after authorities imposed a series of strict restrictions on the world’s largest gaming market as part of a radical crackdown on the tech sector.
Beijing has launched a broad regulatory crackdown on a number of industries to tighten its grip on the economy, with tech companies hit the hardest.
In September, officials said they wanted to address addiction in the crazy nation of games by announcing drastic cuts in the time children spend playing online and ordering players to use cards when registering.
These measures have dealt a severe blow to the ability of companies to make profits in the country and have caused the share prices of gambling companies to fall.
Now Epic has gone offline and claims that it will shut down the hugely popular game on November 15th.
“Fortnite China beta testing has ended and the servers will be shutting down soon,” he said in a statement. “On November 15 at 11 am we will deactivate the game servers and players will no longer be able to connect.”
Shares of Hong Kong-listed Tencent, which owns a large stake in Epic, fell on Tuesday.
The move ends a long-standing test of Epic’s version of Fortnite, which was specially developed for the Chinese market and which checks content for excessive violence.
The action-packed world-building shooter is one of the most popular in the world with over 350 million users, more than the population of the United States.
Epic is the second American company to source a popular product from China in recent weeks after Microsoft announced in October that it was shutting down its career-focused social network, LinkedIn.
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In September, hundreds of Chinese video game makers, including Tencent, pledged to better monitor their products for “politically harmful” content and impose restrictions on underage players to comply with government demands.
The 213 video game companies have pledged in a joint statement to ban “politically harmful, historically nihilistic, dirty and pornographic, gory and terrifying” content.
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