Games and live streaming suspended in China for day of mourning

China’s Tomb-Sweeping Day was turned into a day of mourning for coronavirus victims, with online entertainment shut down

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Subway passengers in Beijing pay a silent tribute to Covid-19 victims on April 4. (Picture: Xinhua)

Xinmei Shen

Published: 8:58pm, 6 Apr 2020Updated: 8:58pm, 6 Apr 2020

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Anyone who awoke in China on Saturday hoping to relax on their day off by playing a few rounds of games like Honor of Kings or Game for Peace would have been disappointed. All of the country's biggest games were shut down for the day.

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That’s because April 4 was Ching Ming Festival, or Tomb-Sweeping Day. During this traditional Chinese festival, families typically honor their ancestors by visiting grave sites. But this year in mainland China, it was also turned into a day of mourning for people who died from the Covid-19 disease caused by the new coronavirus.

As a result, many forms of online entertainment were unavailable as China’s tech companies responded to an order from the State Council to “stop all public entertainment activities.” Tencent and NetEase, China’s two biggest gaming companies, both shut down game servers for 24 hours.

A Weibo official account calls on users to make their profile pictures black and white for the day of mourning for coronavirus victims. (Picture: Weibo)

And non-gamers didn’t fare much better. The country's biggest video streaming sites stopped updating shows for the day and made their websites black and white. Tencent Video, Baidu's iQiyi and Alibaba's Youku all participated.

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(Abacus is a unit of the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba.)

Prefer live streaming? They were out, too. Popular services from Bilibili, Douyu, Huya, Kuaishou and Douyin, the local version of TikTok, all stopped live streaming on their platforms. Users also said videos on their Douyin feed were all positive posts about Covid-19 from state-run news accounts.