Did Tencent Just Quietly Take Down That Illegally Copied Web Game?

I’ve been following the story of Cloudstone for over a week now. If you haven’t, here’s the short version: Chinese developers Baofeng Dongman copied a Western web game called Cloudstone wholesale and made it available via Tencent’s Pengyou platform and the Tencent app store. In a follow-up post, we revealed exclusively the blame-ducking apology of Chinese devs Baofeng Dongman and noted that the game was still available on Tencent’s platforms.

But now it seems that Tencent may have finally removed the app from Pengyou. Although Tencent representatives have continued to ignore Tech in Asia’s requests for comment beyond the brief comment they gave that was published in our first post, the game appears to no longer be playable on Pengyou. While it is still listed, the screenshots have disappeared and clicking the “enter the app” button now takes users to an “Invalid URL” error message rather than the game itself. Interesting, the developer is also unlisted; instead a message reads “This is sensitive information, and will be revealed after the application is formally launched.”

Meanwhile, the game’s page on the Tencent app store is currently returning a “Server is busy, please return to the home page” error message.

With Tencent ignoring our requests for comment on this issue, it’s impossible to confirm that the game has been suspended or deleted, but if this is a bug in the system, it would require one to believe in a very unlikely coincidence. Other games on both Pengyou and the Tencent app store are operating normally, and it seems unlikely that both services would just happen to experience debilitating bugs that affect only a game that has just been revealed to be a fraudulent copy of someone else’s intellectual property.

So what can we say about Tencent? It appears the company is doing the right thing in finally taking the game down. I’d give it zero points for its transparency on the matter (ignoring emails, feigning system bugs to explain away the popular game’s disappearance) but at least the copied game is gone. Tencent, I think, deserves a little credit for that. (I’ll be checking back every now and then to make sure they don’t quietly re-enable the game once the dust settles, though).