Tencent Still Hasn't Removed Stolen Indie Game; Copycat 'Developers' Baofeng Dongman Apologize

Last week, we reported on the blatant theft of Cloudstone, an indie game, by Chinese developers Baofeng Dongman, who then placed the game on Tencent platforms like Pengyou and the Tencent app store. In response to this, Tencent told Tech in Asia:

Our legal department is monitoring the situation and, if found to be a case of infringement, will act on it.

But nearly a week later, the stolen game remains on Tencent’s platforms, and Tencent representatives have failed to respond for requests for updates on what the company is doing, when a resolution can be expected, and what responsibility Tencent itself has in this mess.

Meanwhile, Chinese “developers” Baofeng Dongman have, in a statement emailed to Tech in Asia, apologized for the blatant theft, but also passed the blame onto an unnamed third-party developer. Here is the company’s official statement in full (I have edited it slightly to remove a few spelling errors, but have not changed or moved any of the words):

We are a game distribution company in China, our main business is publishing games in Chinese-speaking areas. It is our mistake that [we] haven’t checked the product carefully enough before the publishing. We apologize for this!

Our suggestions to settle the problem are:
（1）End the cooperation work with this development team;
（2）Offer Playsaurus [the name of the indie team that developed Cloudstone] all the revenue we get from this game (after sharing with the channels);
（3）Establish the direct partnership with Playsaurus.

Hope Playsaurus can update the news during our discussing process. For the reason that we don’t want the public have a bad impression of the whole Chinese game industry. Sorry again for our inattention.

To be quite blunt, I’m a bit skeptical of the assertion that the copied Chinese version of the game wasn’t developed by Baofeng Dongman given that that company is listed as the “developer” in every reference to the game that I’ve found, but we have nevertheless asked Baofeng Dongman to put us in touch with this separate development team. We’ll update with a new post if we ever get through to them.

Cloudstone developers Playsaurus don’t seem particularly interested in any of Baofeng’s proposed resolution options, though. In an email to Tech in Asia, Playasaurus dev Thomas Wolfley said:

We are hesitant to strike a deal with any company that has already proven themselves to do illegal, immoral things. To be honest, we really don’t have enough time (or money) to deal with the situation. Anything more than an e-mail telling them “please take the game down” probably won’t be worth our efforts. We have lots of players to take care of and that’s really our focus.

In the meantime, though, it’s a bit disturbing that Baofeng Dongman, a relatively anonymous company, has been more direct and open in its handling of this mistake than Tencent has. And since Baofeng Dongman has already admitted and apologized for the theft, what the hell is Tencent waiting for? When the developer that submitted a game to your platform has admitted the game is stolen, what possible reason could there be for leaving the game up? There seem, to me, to be two plausible reasons:

• Tencent doesn’t know that Baofeng Dongman has copped to this game being a copy of Cloudstone.
• Tencent doesn’t care and is hoping this will just go away so they can keep making money from the game, which appears to be fairly popular.