Tencent files China's first cloud gaming lawsuit over League of Legends

Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts and now Tencent are all fighting about rights to offer games in the cloud

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League of Legends comes from Tencent subsidiary Riot Games. (Picture: Riot Games)

Josh Ye

Published: 5:45pm, 26 Mar 2020

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Gaming companies can be touchy about where their games get played. Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts won’t let Nvidia host their games on its cloud gaming platform GeForce Now, for example. Now a similar battle is playing out in China with Tencent filing China’s first cloud gaming lawsuit to protect popular games like League of Legends.

According to a court in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, Tencent recently filed legal proceedings against an unnamed tech company in Guangzhou. Tencent accuses the company of making games like League of Legends, CrossFire and Dungeon Fighter Online available to consumers via cloud gaming. Tencent is seeking damages of more than 9.6 million yuan (US$1.35 million).

Tencent is alleging that the Guangzhou company is practicing unfair competition and stealing customers from Tencent’s own cloud gaming platform. Tencent also alleges that the competing platform lowers the graphic quality of the Tencent’s games, leading to a worse experience for users.

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