TENCENT Holdings will shut a popular Texas Hold’Em poker video game, the Chinese tech giant said to its users late Monday, in a further step to comply with intensifying government scrutiny hitting the country’s gaming industry.

Tencent said it would formally close down the server of “Everyday Texas Hold’Em” on Sept. 25. Tencent would compensate users in accordance with regulations of the Ministry of Culture.

The Shenzhen-based company, which draws a huge amount of its profit from gaming, is facing mounting challenges this year from stringent regulation. It has had to pull one blockbuster game and seen others censured.

The company’s market value slumped by around US$20 billion in one day last month over concerns that China would limit gaming after a crackdown on online games citing rising levels of myopia.

A Tencent spokesman said the plan to shutter the game was a “business adjustment” but declined to comment further.

Tencent logged its first quarterly profit decline in nearly 13 years in August, citing issues about getting popular games approved.

Founded in 1998, the firm’s main business is video games but it also runs China’s dominant social network, WeChat, with more than 1 billion users.

A person in Tencent’s gaming division, who declined to be named, said it was not a surprise that chess and card games were falling victim first as they were more closely associated with gambling.

Texas Hold’Em is one of the most popular forms of poker, where multiple players use mind games, bluff and predict their opponents’ behavior to win money in the pot. The game originated in Texas in the early 1900s.

Last year, Tencent had to amend a gory, battle royale-style game, “Playerunknown’s Battleground,” because it “severely deviated from core values.”

The Ministry of Education issued a notice late last month, asking the country’s publishing regulator to control the number of new online video games and take measures to limit the amount of time young people spend playing games.

China overtook the United States as the largest single gaming market by revenue in 2016, and is expected to rake in US$37.9 billion this year, up 17 percent from last year, according to the research firm Newzoo.

(SD-Agencies)