Tencent Wins Lawsuit Against Game Console Pirates

According to Tianyancha App, a commercial information inquiry platform, the first-instance judgment of trademark infringement dispute between Tencent and Guangzhou Ren Wo Xing Video Game Store was made public.

The judgement suggests that plaintiff Tencent argued itself as the exclusive distributor in China as authorized by Nintendo, a Japanese computer game developer, and so had a case against the defendant, Ren Wo Xing Video Game Console Store, which had been blatantly selling a product named “Nintendo NSSWITCH CH Version”. However, it was found that the game console products sold by the defendant weren’t  genuine. Further, the product package features several prominent logos of “Tencent” in both English and Chinese, which also infringes upon the trademark rights of Tencent.

In addition, the non-genuine game console sold by the defendant was found to have a tampered operating system and is equipped with high-risk pirated systems, which constitutes unfair competition.

The defendant earned a profit of 2,802.5 yuan ($442) by selling the pirated products. The court ruled the defendant was to immediately stop selling pirated Nintendo Switch game consoles and compensate the plaintiff, Tencent, for losses and reasonable rights protection expenses, which totals 204,129 yuan.

As early as 2019, Tencent announced to sell the Nintendo Switch, a family game console, in China. Many media then considered the strong alliance between Tencent and Nintendo as an attempt to open up the Chinese market, the largest game market in the world.

SEE ALSO: Tencent Reaches Deal with Olympic Council of Asia and Asian Electronic Sports Federation

In January 2021, Tencent announced to have had shipped over 1 million units of Nintendo products since the launch of Switch consoles in China at the end of 2019.