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Tencent fighting cheating and rewarding good behaviour with social score system

Tencent fighting cheating and rewarding good behaviour with social score system

Chinese games firm Tencent has introduced a new social credit score for players in China.

Per a tweet from Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad, Game Credit will reward users who play regularly, earn items and report cheaters with a higher credit score. On the flip side, negative behaviour such as cheating will have a detrimental impact on their score.

Right now the system is only live in China, but given Tencent's rather sizeable footprint in the West, this could actually be a viable way of fighting cheating and other toxicity over here. The firm owns - or at least owns a stake in - League of Legends firm Riot, Fortnite and Unreal maker Epic, Clash of Clans outfit Supercell, as well as Activision Blizzard, Frontier and Milky Tea.

The notion of a social score is rather similar to that seen in a Black Mirror episode, which isn't the best place to find inspiration for applying technology, we must admit. But this could well be one means of incentivising good behaviour. Toxicity in the games space is one of the hottest topics right now.

Titles like Playerunknown's Battlegrounds are in an on-going war with cheaters - so much so that the game's development is slowing to accommodate this fight.

Meanwhile, managing toxic communities has become a big deal, too, with the teams behind Rainbow Six: Siege and Overwatch - to name just two - putting a great deal of effort to combating the negativity in the community.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.