User:Asdfgh2024/Tencent

Allegations of copying
As one of the world's largest internet companies, Tencent does not have a good history.

In 1996, an Israeli company named Mirabilis released one of the first stand alone instant messaging clients named ICQ. Three years later, Tencent released a copied version of ICQ, naming it OICQ, which stands for Open ICQ. After losing the lawsuit against AOL, which bought ICQ in 1998, for violating ICQ's intellectual property rights, Tencent released a new version of OICQ in December 2000 and named it QQ. With its model of free-to-use and charging for customizing personal avatars, QQ hit 50 million users in its second year, 856 million users and at most 45.3 million sychronous users in 2008.

At early stages, Tencent stole ideas from its competitors and created counterfeit copies of their products, catching up from behind with its long held free policy. QQ farm was a direct copy of Happy Farm, QQ dance was originated from Audition Online, QQ speed copied play style from Crazyracing Kartrider. In December 2015, Tencent gained a hundred percent stake in Riot Games. In November 2015, Tencent released Honors of Kings, a mobile version of League of Legends developed by Riot Games.

Tencent's monopoly and suppression
To rebuild its reputation lost from allegations of copying, Tencent changed its strategy to aggressively investing in other companies. In 2020, Tencent had invested in over 800 companies across the world. During 2012 and 2019, Tencent has invested in world-wide-famous game developers such as Epic Games, Activision Blizzard, SuperCell, Bluehole. While this type of investment can consistently benefit Tencent, it might not benefit the invested companies. Colin Huang, founder of Pinduoduo, said “Tencent won’t die when Pinduoduo dies, because it has tens of thousands of sons.” In 2020, Tencent profited 24 billion dollars and spent most of it into investment. Winners in this investment might not always be the best in its industry, which harms innovation and efficiency.