Huawei removes Tencent games from its app store temporarily after dispute over promotional agreement
- For most of Friday, Huawei users were unable to download Tencent games from the Huawei AppGallery
- A notice posted in Tencent’s gaming community said the apps were removed due to non renewal of the Mobile Game Promotion Project Agreement
Huawei Technologies Co, the world’s largest telecommunications equipment company, removed Tencent Holdings’ games from its app store on the first day of the new year, after a dispute over a promotional agreement which was later resolved the same day.
For most of Friday, Huawei users were unable to download Tencent games from the Huawei AppGallery, including its most famous mobile game Honour of Kings, but Tencent titles already installed on phones or downloaded from other Android app stores were still accessible.
“Tencent Games unilaterally made significant changes to the cooperation between the two parties … resulting in major obstacles to continued cooperation,” an official notice posted in Huawei’s gaming community said. “After careful evaluation by our legal team, we had to comply with the relevant unilateral request from Tencent to halt cooperation and remove Tencent games from the Huawei AppGallery.”
“Huawei admires the achievements and absolute market position of Tencent’s gaming business. While we do not agree, we can understand Tencent’s request arising from [their position],” the notice added.
In the September quarter, revenue from Tencent’s online games business grew 45 per cent year on year, the fastest since the third quarter of 2017, according to its results announced in November.
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A notice posted in Tencent’s gaming community said the gaming apps were “suddenly” removed at midnight due to non renewal of the Mobile Game Promotion Project Agreement between the two parties. The notice also said Tencent was “actively communicating and negotiating” with Huawei and hopes to bring the gaming apps back as soon as possible.
On Friday night, Tencent published another notice saying the company has reached an agreement with Huawei.
“Tencent’s games are now available in Huawei’s app store again,” said the notice. “Both sides will continue working together to bring customers even better experiences and services.”
Huawei and Tencent did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In August, a similar dispute erupted in public in the US when Apple and Google removed Epic Games’ Fortnite from their app stores for violating in-app payment guidelines, prompting Epic to file federal lawsuits challenging the rule.
Then in September, the Post reported that two highly anticipated Chinese games, Lilith Games’ Rise of Kingdoms and miHoYo’s Genshin Impact, could not reach a deal with app stores – including those from Huawei and Xiaomi – due to disagreements over revenue sharing.
It is rare for Chinese tech giants to engage in corporate quarrels in public as such disagreements are more often solved behind closed doors. Tencent said in November that Honour of Kings became the first game on any platform to average more than 100 million daily active users.
Huawei’s app store had more than 390 million active users worldwide as of November 2019, still small compared with Google Play which had more than 2 billion monthly active users in the same period.
