After LinkedIn declared the termination of its operations in China less than a month ago, two more major IT companies have followed suit. Epic Games acknowledged the end of the Fortnite game in China last week, nearly simultaneously with Yahoo’s announcement of its exit from the country.
In both cases, the judgments were prompted by the Chinese government’s recent stringent measures aimed at tightening control over the economy. The new restrictions have had a significant impact on the IT industry.
In the case of video games, titles must go through a lengthy vetting procedure before being released, and they are frequently subjected to censorship.
Furthermore, local governments have begun to limit the amount of time that children under the age of 18 spend playing online (3 hours a week).
Fortnite’s exit from China, according to Epic Games, will finish on November 15, when the country’s servers will be shut down. However, new player registrations are no longer accepted on the platform.
Yahoo is on the same track.
Yahoo’s operations in China came to an end on Monday (1), when the popular search engine became unavailable to Chinese Internet users. The platform, which debuted in the nation in 1999, arrived at a period when the internet was not widely used, a circumstance that is very different from now.
After a strong start, the firm began to limit its—-presence in the Chinese market in 2013, when several services, like as free email and news platforms, were no longer available to Chinese customers. The business dissolved its Beijing branch two years later, laying off around 300 people.
Yahoo defended its permanent pullout from China in a statement, noting the country’s “increasingly challenging legal and commercial climate.” The organization also stated that it was still dedicated to a “free and open internet.”
Several additional platforms are unavailable in the Asian country due to Beijing administrative limitations. In addition to Google, social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, as well as YouTube and Wikipedia, are restricted.
