Tencent Receives $46,906 in Lawsuit with Game Account Rental Platform

Enterprise information inquiry platform Qichacha App showed that, recently, Tencent received 300,00 yuan ($46,906) as compensation for its lawsuit against a game account rental platform.

The court hearing the case was Nanshan District People’s Court, in Shenzhen City, Guangdong Province. Tencent initially asked the platform’s operating company to immediately stop renting and lending accounts for Tencent’s games. Tencent also asked the other party to publish a statement in a prominent position on its rental website’s homepage, app and Legal Daily for one month to eliminate the impact. In addition, Tencent hopes to receive another 3 million yuan as compensation.

According to the court, the platform involved is jointly operated by Juhaowan and Shuizhu. The platform provides game account rental services, and collects commissions and cash withdrawal fees from users. As a result, the number of registered users of Tencent’s games and the probability of their game recharge decreases. The game level of the actual users of the account will be inconsistent with the account’s information, which would then destroy the balance, fairness and user experience of the game.

The behavior of these two companies constitutes unfair competitive practices, and should bear the legal responsibilities of their actions, the court said in the announcement.

Since the beginning of this year, many regulations have been issued to prevent minors from spending too much time playing online games. In September of this year, the national court system issued the first ban on several game rental platforms. Two Hubei network companies were asked to immediately stop the rental services for “Honor of Kings” game accounts, and a Changsha network company was asked to immediately stop publicizing, promoting and distributing illegal accounts for these two Hubei companies.

Chinese state television network CCTV reported in September that a grey market has formed in which web users can play online games without any restrictions simply by paying money to rent another account. In response, Tencent Games called for the introduction of laws and regulations as soon as possible to strictly control the renting and selling of user accounts. At that time, Tencent had filed lawsuits or sent letters to more than 20 account trading platforms and several e-commerce platforms to stop related services.

SEE ALSO: Tencent Calls for Further Regulation After CCTV Exposes Dark Transactions by Game Accounts