Tencent is having a hard time keeping up with demand for its games as people stay indoors amid the coronavirus outbreak. China’s most popular game, the local version of Arena of Valor known as Honor of Kings, recently went down briefly. News of the outage immediately went viral on social media.
Players of Tencent’s smash-hit mobile game found themselves unable to connect to the game Tuesday night. Shortly after initial reports, developers said the issue was resolved. But it still became viral news on Weibo, with one related hashtag trending as high as fourth place on Weibo’s hot search chart. While Tencent apologized for the inconvenience, it didn’t give a reason for the crash.
According to Nomura and Sinolinks Securities, Honor of Kings has recently been seeing more than 100 million users logging in everyday -- a massive surge over the 60 million users it was previously seeing. All the new homebodies spending more time gaming during the coronavirus outbreak brought down another Tencent game recently: The local version of PUBG Mobile called Game for Peace. Tencent said it was expanding server capacity to accommodate more players.