China's Ministry of Culture is launching a campaign to work on the rampant problems with copyright infringement for online games, online music, online animation, electronic games and karaoke services. The MoC also plans to shut down online game servers, operators and virtual currency distributors that are currently running without government permission - primarily companies in the Bohai Bay, Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta. It is good news for the games industry to have copyright issues tackled, though it might be better news to have that effort extend toward packaged products as well as online games. There is no direct mention of stopping online sites that offer PC offline games for free illegal download, yet there is a business-led solution that has been in place for more than 1 year now to stop infringers of that nature. There have been no recent reports of the success of that business-led solution.

After the recent dispute between Tencent and Qihoo 360, Tencent has apologized to its users for the inconvenience caused by reimbursing them with Q coins. For every 1 RMB spent per month on Tencent's service fees the past month, they will receive 1 Q coin (which amounts to 1 RMB).  However, in the Q3 earnings report Tencent explains that the company has sued Qihoo 360 and that the reimbursement is because they did not communicate well with QQ users, but further explained that the situation happened very fast and proper communication was not feasible. The dispute arose when Tencent suspended its IM service (the wildly popular QQ) on computers where it detected software by an anti-virus software company called Qihoo 360. The software closes down pop-up windows, advertisements, music and pets on QQ, and also spurred negative messages about other companies' pruducts including Baidu, Sohu, Maxthon, Kingsoft and Keniu. Qihoo told its users that Tencent was violating privacy by giving out private user data, and Tencent said it is not true and that as a result, anyone who runs Qihoo cannot use QQ until they uninstall Qihoo's software. In the latest chapter of this saga, Tencent is offering users Q Coins as an apology for the inconvenience.

Tencent's Q3 earnings showed 19.3% growth quarter on quarter for online games, led by Cross Fire.  That value is more than half of the total earned by online games in the first half of 2010, and nearly half of the total earned by online games in all of 2009.