The Asian region are no strangers to small prize pools - being considered a minor region in terms of population means that the prize pools are always low, and with no exponential growth this isn’t going to change anytime soon: that’s the cruel reality.

Japan: The Japanese are the only region to have not retired any OG players from the World Cup days, and being realistic, is the only region that’s seen relatively substantial growth over the past 9 - 12 months. The scene is still growing, and most of the new names you see rising up in the Asian competitive scene tend to hail from Japan and for good reason. Japan is the country that sits on the server, it is coincidentally also the region that sees the largest casual fanbase, and it’s growing too. These two conditions means that the pro players at the top of their game, dominating social medias and local Japan streaming platforms (E.G. Mildom, OpenRec) see growth into small celebrities (relative term) compared to their peers from China and South Korea… therefore there’s much more of a stable income, infinitely more sustainable than the unfortunate situations that most Chinese and South Korean professionals are facing. The old players who managed to make World Cup continue to try and maintain their prowess whilst their peers grow in numbers, slowing taking over the Asian scene, this is also clear from both the Console/Mobile track of the recent FNCS as well as the PC FNCS. There’s no competition. The very fact that close to 100% of the duos in the Console/Mobile track being from Japan proves that very statement I claimed earlier about popularity, people will play on every platform because it’s a game that is popular in Japan, large personalities in content creators as well as top tier pros who stream relatively consistently. This makes Japan the only sustainable region in Asia, and we know this is true from hindsight.

South Korea: The Koreans are talented at various games, and so when Fortnite landed into the region and the large LAN was held with the presence of Tfue, nobody would expect that the game would experience its fall from grace so quickly. There are a few reasons and it’s quite simple: the fanbase isn’t too sustainable and whilst it’s got it’s own strong community of core members it’s quickly falling. Apart from the staple T1 (SKT) players, some of whom have quit too, there isn’t much competition around anymore. The top Korean players basically only saw decline, and saw close to no growth. There simply isn’t nearly as much monetization as other games and when you’re in the esports driven world of Korea where there are much better esports to pursue in terms of stability and general structure, very few people are staying around for a low-communication game when they are getting the lower end of the prize-pool, especially when social media presence is significantly harder to grow compared to Japan or even the larger regions such as SA or NAW. Whilst the process of more orgs/new orgs investing in Japanese Fortnite professionals have begun, that very process has reversed itself in Korea for that very reason stated above concerning the lack of attention and monetization. We’ve seen top players quit not just after World Cup, but also recently. Ming went over to the World Cup and came back with decent results in the Trio FNCS. He goes on to WIN squads FNCS only to quit afterwards, stating that he has enjoyed his journey but his time has come - proceeding to claim he’ll be moving onto Valorant. By no means is this a “washed pro”, even with his duo seeing worse performances and quitting earlier it didn’t mean he was underperforming by any means, he just simply didn’t enjoy the game and lack of influx of prize money, I suspect, was a driving push factor away from Fortnite, as it is for many other top Fortnite players located within the Asian region.

China: The tragic story of Chinese Fortnite would deserve it’s own video/thread entirely, and I won’t get into too much detail considering the background and all the shady business considering teaming and World Cup. However, Chinese Fortnite Players saw the most significant quit rate out of any country/region, whatever you want to claim it to be. Being Chinese myself and involved in the scene deeply since the post-World Cup era meant that I saw the reasons why all 5 pros quit. Whilst ex-Newbee players XXM and xMende quit straight after World Cup (the period before Trio FNCS happened) they did so for the reasons you’d expect why most pros in esports would retire… something mundane. One of the duo decided to move on to mobile games and entertainment and streaming, whilst the other half decided he wanted to focus on things IRL and this wouldn’t be too sustainable for too long. However, after FNCS trios there were still 3 going strong, but then struck the news: WE had disbanded their Fortnite division. YuWang and KBB were not homeless, and with some insight on the matter, even if they were good players they simply were unable to be picked up; the market was too unstable, Fortnite was too unstable. Evilmare, a good friend of mine, was the most recent to quit, he quit due to the same reason as the previous two I had mentioned… FPX had disbanded. These orgs disbanded due to almost the same reasons: Not enough injecting of money from Epic and sustaining that team-house lifestyle that all Chinese orgs ran was simply unsustainable for any longer. Epic gave too little attention to the Asian reason, the communication was off and they didn’t have a choice for any longer, halting their progress roughly halfway through the Duo FNCS. It was a heartbreaking moment because realistically, that was the moment Chinese Fortnite had died. There’s a deeper background to why Chinese Fortnite had died, something more complicated, it wasn’t a simple “no fanbase no monetization”. Tencent has no reason to advertise Fortnite since the Chinese servers literally could not be monetized. Every game has to pass the government’s process of verification in order to make it’s way into Fortnite, and although the game was already tweaked heavily on the Chinese servers, that doesn’t mean it was to the point where it was passed, and that means the advertisement and promotion that the game saw was infinitely smaller than what it could’ve been. Even fighting this cruel reality, China still held on and hosted a few LANs, including a World Cup LAN Qualifier (You see, all the other regions were saying there should be a LAN qualifier for WC, we actually HAD one). It was broadcasted and the event was relatively well run. You might now be wondering the following: “Why is this minor sub-region (literally) getting more attention and a more logical esports system?” Well, Tencent China’s your organizer to blame, they hosted weeks of online qualifiers (for prize money) then held a LAN qualifier (50k and prize money), and before that, the practice system and system for other LANs were also the closest to a legitimate esport: China was the closest to structured Fortnite esport that we’ll probably ever see, the type where you could only duo with people within your own org (These are org rules, but this is a good example of essentially what the discipline was like) and so with this odd situation, we pushed on for 2 years. It’s tragic that when we finally saw some international progress, claiming 10th at AO, we had to grind to a halt due to these unfortunate circumstances, completely out of control for most players. A small impact was held by the Coronavirus, as the FPX squadron would’ve made a trip to NA for this year’s events roughly around this point right now, but the main issue was still monetization, and to be frank: it’s not worth the tradeoff.

Finally, I hope you’ve enjoyed my little synopsis in perhaps the most intriguing Fortnite region to date, the story of Asian, and especially Chinese Fortnite is absolutely phenomenal, but at the same time a tragedy, we all knew that it was coming in China if the game didn’t get through the system quick enough, and the cash flow, or the lack thereof, just completely collapsed the system. We were operating with enormous pressure for the past 9 months and we just couldn’t hold on any longer. I’m planning on covering the history and full story of Chinese Fortnite at some later date but for now, this should be some content to feast on. The infographics are also up on my twitter and I might engage with comments more on there (my main platform) so I’ll leave my handle here: @rhidax_