Zhang Yang

nicolezyyy@163.com

THE city’s consumer council received 549 complaints regarding the excessive consumption of online games by juveniles between Jan. 1 last year and June 22 this year, with 83 percent of the complaints targeting the Internet giant Tencent, which has profited a lot from its popular mobile game King of Glory, the council said yesterday.

Tencent received 456 complaints regarding the excessive consumption of online games by juveniles, accounting for 83 percent of the same kind of complaints received by the council.

Shenzhen Topway Video Communication Co. Ltd. received the second most complaints, accounting for 6.38 percent of the total complaints.

The report also noted that 68.87 percent of complaints involved the spending of less than 5,000 yuan (US$738) by juvenile users on online games, while 15.3 percent involved between 5,000 and 10,000 yuan and 16 percent involved more than 10,000 yuan.

Over 49 percent of the complaint cases were closed following mediation or reconciliation between users and game operators.

A resident surnamed Wang complained to the council Feb. 14 after his 7-year-old son added 30,000 yuan to his King of Glory account without his parents’ permission. Wang demanded a refund from Tencent, but the company asked Wang to contact Apple to get a refund because his son had topped up the account via Apple’s payment system.

A 12-year-old King of Glory player spent nearly 60,000 yuan on the game between March 5 in 2016 and March 10 this year. The kid’s father, surnamed Xu, requested a refund but was rejected by Tencent because the child had topped up the account via taobao.com instead of paying directly in the game.

A resident surnamed Feng got a full refund of 15,371 yuan from Tencent after her 14-year-old son spent the money on King of Glory by linking his WeChat account to Feng’s credit card.

Another resident, surnamed Hu, demanded that Tencent refund 100,000 yuan that his 12-year-old kid had spent on QQ virtual coins last September. However, the company said the user only spent 65,000 yuan on the virtual coins and it eventually agreed to return 52,000 yuan to the family.