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The Chinese competitive Fortnite scene is in the midst of one of the biggest scandals in competitive Fortnite, but very little has been said about it. Evilmare, KBB, YuWang, xMende, and XXM all retired suddenly and with minimal explanation after appearing at the Fortnite World Cup.
With the revelation that the gaming organization Newbee Gaming had been engaged in match fixing and other unsportsmanlike activities, some new information has been revealed about what happened to all five of these players, and what’s been happening within the Chinese competitive Fortnite community as a whole.
Chinese Fortnite coach, Rhidax (@rhidax_) has provided significant information and analysis regarding why this has happened.
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Five Chinese Pros make it to the Fortnite World Cup
The five Chinese pros were spread around three gaming organizations, with Evilmare representing FunPlus Phoenix (FPX), KBB and YuWang representing Team World Elite (WE), and xMende and XXM representing Newbee Gaming. All five of these players retired abruptly and have not been seen since.
The reasons each of them retired differs slightly, but all ties into how Fortnite has been failing the Chinese region, and how some organizations have taken advantage of that situation.
Immediately after the Fortnite World Cup, xMende and XXM both announced their retirements from Fortnite. When pressed for information, both gave mundane reasons for their retirement. China still had three players ready to compete, however, and the next Fortnite Champion Series would be a trios event, which seemed to fit.
However, before long Team World Elite announced it would be disbanding its Fortnite team, leaving KBB and YuWang without an organization to support them. As both were unable to get picked up, they would both leave the competitive Fortnite scene. Not long after, FunPlus Phoenix would follow suit and disband its Fortnite team, prompting Evilmare to retire as well.
Newbee Gaming steals $100,000 from its players
Recent accusations have come out against Newbee Gaming, however, which revealed that its two members never saw any of the prize money they had won during the Fortnite World Cup. During the duos tournament xMende and XXM only managed to place 49th (out of 50), however all participants were guaranteed a payout of at least $50,000 simply for qualifying.
Newbee Gaming reportedly took this prize money, however, with sources stating that the money was “swallowed by the organization.” Additionally, it appears as though the players’ options are limited in terms of ways to get that money back as Newbee Gaming’s Fortnite organization seems to have vanished as well.
Newbee Gaming has recently come under fire in other competitive communities as well when it was discovered they participated in match fixing for DOTA 2, which eventually resulted in them being banned from participating in official DOTA 2 tournaments. Because Newbee Gaming actually oversaw five DOTA 2 teams, this likely spelled the end for their organization as a whole.
Fortnite struggles to find a home in China
Chinese competitive gaming has adopted multiple games across almost every genre, with FIFA, DOTA 2 and League of Legends, Overwatch and Valorant, Street Fighter and Tekken, and almost anything else with a competitive community. However, Fortnite has struggled to find a home in China, and the low prize pools and small playerbase may have been in part why some organizations, like Newbee Gaming, have resorted to shady business practices to turn a profit.
There are numerous reasons why Fortnite has failed in China, ranging from the poor financial support to the lack of official government approval. Each setback leads to further setbacks, and the result is that the game fails and the players lose out on their hard earned money.
Why do Fortnite events have minimal prize support in China?
The low prize pool in Chinese Fortnite events is often blamed for the reason that the competitive Fortnite scene in China is dying. The logic is that larger prizes would result in more players being interested in playing the game competitively and also allow competitive Fortnite organizations in China to become financially viable.
Although evidence suggests that Newbee Gaming had other illicit activities going on, the legitimate Fortnite organizations might have been able to sustain themselves if the money was there. This lack of prize support often gets blamed on Epic ignoring the region, but there is actually a lot more going on behind the scenes that lead to this situation.
Low player base results in low prize support
Because Fortnite is less popular in the Chinese region than in other regions Epic seems to not want to dedicate as much money to it. This makes some sense, as every dollar spent on the North American and European regions likely results in significantly more value than a dollar spent in the East Asian region, but there’s more at play than just money.
Using numbers from a tournament in early June, the East Asian Fortnite server had more players than the Middle East server and the Oceania server despite having a prize pool equivalent to the servers with half players, and only 12.5% of that given to the European region.
Why does Fortnite struggle to grow a player base in East Asia?
Players in China have other difficulties which prevent the game from taking off in the country. The country is notoriously closed off, and this applied to Fortnite as well, as the country only recently got the ability to play the game with players outside of mainland China. The Chinese competitive Fortnite scene grew, instead, from large LAN events, rather than from online events pushed or supported by Epic directly.
For the rest of East Asia, players often fail to enjoy the game due to an ongoing issue of high ping. At the moment, servers for the Asian region are hosted in Tokyo. As some have pointed out, this results in only players in Japan, Korea, and parts of eastern China having good ping, while everyone else struggles with 70+ ping.
In a game as fast paced as Fortnite, that difference can often result in losing to someone else who can abuse tricks only available to players with extremely low ping.
Altogether, this means that the Asian region in Fortnite has simply failed to grow outside of Japan, which unfortunately limits the market share and reduces the amount of money Epic can expect to make in the area.
How does Epic make money off of Fortnite?
Epic also has little reason to support this region any more than it has because it has been unable to monetize the region. The overwhelming majority of money taken in by Fortnite comes from V-Bucks purchases, which means that the game is financially supported by its casual audience and not its competitive audience.
However, monetization efforts have an additional obstacle in China. Chinese law requires that foreign companies partner with a Chinese company if they intend to operate within China, and that they meet certain requirements in order to be monetized. Fortnite had already undergone multiple significant changes to the game, however it still failed to earn official government approval.
This means that Tencent, the game’s distributor in China, is still not able to monetize the game. This lack of monetization means that both Tencent and Epic have little reason to funnel money into the Chinese competitive Fortnite scene.
The unfortunate position of Chinese Fortnite
It’s important to remember that Fortite is ultimately a business. The goal of the game is to make money, and the way it accomplishes that can occasionally put it at odds with others. Epic’s special brand of addictive and creative Fortnite gameplay competes with the Chinese government’s goals of looking out for its nation’s social well being.
Certain changes, such as limiting how long a player can play Fortnite or encouraging good players to leave matches in order to allow others a chance at winning, are ways the Chinese government tries to maintain the social gaming culture within China. However, this can also make the game incompatible with the game played in neighboring countries, further limiting the size of the Chinese Fortnite player base.
So what happened to the five Chinese World Cup competitors?
Evilmare, KBB, YuWang, xMende, and XXM have all been absent from competitive Fortnite since their retirements. For xMende and XXM it is understandable why they might choose to leave an organization which limited their ability to support themselves. The others, however, retired for much more mundane reasons.
Evilmare, KBB, and YuWang all might have wanted to continue playing Fortnite, but as athletes they simply couldn’t justify the time required to sustain themselves. When the nation entered into quarantine earlier this year, it put further financial strain on competitive Fortnite, especially because most of the money in the scene required Chinese players to play outside the country to win prizes big enough.
Reportedly some of them have decided to move on to other games, however without an international presence it will be hard to confirm without being part of the Chinese competitive gaming scene.
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