Mobile Legends Developer Moonton Wins Defamation Lawsuit Against Tencent

A Shanghai court has ruled in favor of Mobile Legends developer MOONTON Games in a court battle against megacorp Tencent, following what’s described as corporate defamation against the former.

According to Jiemian, the court ruled in favor of MOONTON and upheld a previous verdict that Tencent’s actions amounted to corporate slander, in an effort to discredit the game developer and weaken their position in Indonesia.

The report says that Tencent had hired lawyers to approach MOONTON’s partners in Indonesia, RevivalTV, ahead of the MPL esports tournament.

As per Yicai’s report, Tencent had used intimidating language, claiming that they’d already won the ongoing plagiarism court case between Mobile Legends and Riot’s League of Legends (Riot is owned by Tencent), despite no such verdict existing.

This stems from the forming of MOONTON itself- Tencent’s claim is that MOONTON CEO Xu Zhenhua had violated non-compete agreements by forming the company after he was terminated from the company.

However, the court ruled that telling business partners the company had won a lawsuit it hadn’t was out of line, resulting in them losing the case.

As a result, Tencent is being ordered to pay out a total of 220,000 Yuan (over RM143,000) to MOONTON in damages for the incident.

It should be noted that a previous court had already ruled in MOONTON’s favor, and today’s verdict was a result of the Appeals Court upholding the verdict against Tencent.

Neither company has commented on the lawsuit following the decision.

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