Bulletins

There will be no more Fortnite in China

Epic Games is ending its two-year experiment to try to build a Chinese version of Fortnite.

A grayscale screenshot of Fortnite characters from Epic's "Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite" video

Fortnite is ending its test of the platform in China after two years.

Image: Epic Games

Epic Games will shutter Fortnite in China on Nov. 15 after a two-year experiment to try to build a version of the platform that met Chinese government rules for gaming companies. The company did not explain why it was ending the effort.

Fortress Night was created in partnership with Chinese gaming company Tencent and was significantly altered from the U.S.-based version of the game, and included tools that tried to limit how much time a person could spend playing. It also had no functionality for small in-app purchases. A Chinese national authority has tried to limit how much time children can play games, issuing a regulation in late August that attempts to prevent those under 18 from playing more than three hours of video games each week.

Epic Games is the latest in a string of American tech companies to recently announce the removal of U.S.-based platforms from China, including Microsoft's LinkedIn and Apple's removal of several religious apps from the app store.

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the date that Fortnite will close. This story was updated on Nov. 1, 2021.

Anna Kramer

Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (Twitter: @ anna_c_kramer, email: akramer@protocol.com), where she writes about labor and workplace issues. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.

fortniteepicepic gameschina
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