April is the cruellest month, especially for the fans of Yunshang Yuyi, a dating game with costume design as its core gameplay. The game has more than 3.7 million players on iOS after it was published by Tencent in 2018.
It was quite unexpected for most players to be announced that the game will be shut down in April, since the game just released a new costume and some microtransaction campaigns at the end of 2021.
A new in-game event just released in last December
According to the game's official announcement, Tencent decides to cease the operation of Yushang Yuyi, because the game agency agreement between Tencent Games and Seasun Entertainment, the game's developer, is about to expire. The announcement also mentioned that all account info and character data will be deleted.
The news soon triggered players. Tags relevant to Yunshang Yuyi became trending on Weibo, players demanding refunds and retaining their user data flooded all .
This is not the only bad news for Seasun. Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, a role-playing mobile game also published and operated in China by Seasun Entertainment, will also stop its services in in April.
In a letter to players, Seasun explained that problems with the basic gameplay and unbalanced payments led to the eventual closure of Final Fantasy Brave Exvius.
The stock price of Kingsoft, the parent company of Seasun, has fallen by nearly 10% in the past two days.
Coincidentally, Alice Gear Aegis, an action shooter mobile game will also stop operation in mainland China in April 2022. The game was published by Bilibili, the rising anime content giant, and was just released in April 2021.
The promotion poster of Alice Gear Aegis
In the past, a multiplayer mobile game would stop service only when it’s seriously underperforming on the market. However, three games of this caliber all ceasing operating at a same month is quite unusual. This might be related to the fact that China has stopped issuing video game publication licenses (or registration numbers) for 7 months, making it very difficult for some games to introduce major version updates. And also just recently, a rumor of anime games is going to be under tighter regulations. Either way, this April would be very cruel to many smaller mobile games and publishers in China.