Tencent has Call of Duty and Game of Thrones but gamers don’t care

Tencent is bringing some of the biggest IPs to mobile this year, recently releasing the trailers for Call of Duty Mobile and a Game of Thrones smartphone game. But Chinese gamers are far from thrilled.

Why? Take Call of Duty Mobile. It’s a free-to-play game developed by Activision Blizzard and Tencent’s own Timi Studio. But gamers seem to believe that Timi Studio’s involvement will only lower the game’s quality.

“Timi! It has ruined quite a number of games 😭. Maybe you can leave COD alone…” one Weibo user wrote.

“Timi… This is looking like a pay-to-win game already,” another Weibo user added.

What do they mean by Timi ruining games? Consider Timi’s Contra: Return. The studio took the classic one-hit-kill, run-and-gun arcade game and turned it into a pay-to-win title in which fighters can auto-aim and have health bars (oh, and they inserted schoolgirls to fight alongside Bill and Lance).

Contra: Return is not the only game that has given Timi a bad reputation. Gamers also frown upon many other games for being clones of foreign hits. For instance, QQ Speed Drifters and Crossfire essentially started as knockoffs of Mario Kart and Counter-Strike.