Beijing has embarked on a wide-ranging regulatory clampdown
on a number of industries in a drive to tighten its control of the economy,
with tech firms taking the brunt of the pain.
In September, officials said they wanted to curb addiction
in the gaming-mad nation by announcing drastic cuts to the amount of time
children can spend playing online and ordering players to use ID cards when
registering.
The moves dealt a severe blow to companies' ability to make
profits and sent the share prices of gaming firms tumbling.
Now, Epic has pulled the plug on Fortnite, saying it will
shut down the massively popular game on November 15.
"Fortnite China's Beta test has reached an end, and the
servers will be closed soon," it said in a statement.
"On November 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, which has a large stake
in Epic, were down Tuesday.
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 United States.
Industry crackdown
Epic is the second US-based company to pull a popular
product from China in recent weeks, after Microsoft announced in October that
it will close its career-oriented social network LinkedIn.
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.
Fortnite's announcement 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
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 Weibo shared a link to a
petition where players urged Epic to transfer players' data to servers outside
China, writing they would lose the gaming data with "our heart and
mind" stored in it.