Fortnite,
the immensely popular online video game, will no longer be available in China
as US-based tech giant Epic Games said it will shut down the game after Beijing
imposed a series of curbs on gaming in the world’s biggest gaming market as
part of a sweeping crackdown on the tech industry.

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China has
gone into a regulatory overdrive of late in a bid to better manage the country’s
economy. As part of such regulations, Chinese authorities said in September
that they want to strictly limit the amount of time children spend with their
gaming devices. Gamers were now required to enter identification to play games
and there were strict limits on timings.

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For
Beijing, the stated objective was to beat the gaming addiction affecting China’s
teenagers. For companies, however, the move meant a severe blow to profits and
led to share prices of companies tumbling. Tired of taking regulatory heat, Epic
has pulled the plug on Fortnite saying that it will shut down the game in China
on November 15.

“Fortnite
China’s Beta test has reached an end, and the servers will be closed soon. On
November 15 at 11 am, we will turn off game servers and players will no longer
be able to log in,” the company said in a statement.

Epic’s
Chinese Fortnite was specifically created for the market where video game
content is policed for excessive violence. The Chinese test version was
released in 2018, but Fortnite did not receive an official greenlight from the
Chinese government. Approvals for new games also kept slowing down.

Fortnite an 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. Epic is the second major
US-based company to pull out of China after Microsoft announced that it will
close its career-oriented social network LinkedIn.