A closure that occurs while China squeezes the screw with digital uses and video games.
Le Monde with AFP
The game Fortnite phenomenon, which brings together 350 million adepts around the world, will withdraw from China, announced its publisher, Epic Games.
“On November 15 at 11 o’clock, we will turn the game servers and players [in China] will no longer be able to connect,” wrote the US company Sunday, October 31 in a statement. The next day, it was impossible for the new players to register from China.
This decision occurs while China’s screw clamping on digital uses and video games has been accelerating for a year, and more since this summer. Since the end of August, the practice of online video games is prohibited for minors during the week, and limited to three hours on weekends.
The Chinese Giant of Tencent, the second shareholder of Epic Games (also mainly held by his founder, the American Tim Sweeney) is particularly proactive in this respect, having imposed the use of the use of the Facial recognition to ban children and teenagers to play on their smartphone or tablet in the evening.
A version of the game approved by the Chinese government
Launched in 2017, Fortnite is a game called “Battle Royale”, in which one hundred participants are parachute on an island and compete to become the last survivor. With its colors, its graphics that evoke those of a cartoon and its amusing references to pop culture, the game of Epic Games, very public, is a thousand leagues of the realism of other games of military shots more adult. To the point of attracting the attention of artists, like Ariana Grande or Travis Scott, or sportsmen, like Neymar, who have already appeared in the form of avatars during virtual events.
Yet launched in the spring of 2018, the Chinese version of Fortnite differs from many aspects of the distributed version in the rest of the world. The equilibrium of the game has been revised to encourage short games, and several logos, objects, weapons and character clothes have been redesigned to remove references to death, skulls and bones. In the Chinese version of what is basically a shooting game, players are being explained to explain that they do not embark warriors with firearms, but holograms immersed in a simulation.
The main difference, however, is that if, in the rest of the world, Fortnite draws most of their income from the sale of additional content, such as outfits and dance moves for their characters, the Chinese version of the Game does not offer this kind of “microtransactions”, yet at the heart of Epic Games’s economic model.
Citing a “difficult environment”, Microsoft’s LinkedIn Professional Social Network also announced last month its next withdrawal from China.