Hot virtual social tool Remo looks very, very familiar

The article is contributed by a friend who has worked in both Chinese and American tech companies, and is currently pursuing his MBA. He prefers to remain anonymous but is open to feedback through [email protected] 

A few people have been telling me recently that, in the strange era of covid-19 pandemic, a virtual social tool called Remo is really gaining popularity.

My friends have used it, and loved it. And it seems one of the companies I used to work with also uses Remo to run their own engagement events.

On Remo’s web site, the following ‘unique features’ are listed: 

And this screenshot from their demo basically tells you what you can do with it:

Somehow, when I first saw it, I felt an eery sense of familiarity. I must have seen something like this before.

Flipping through my memory, and also my various social subscriptions, I realised – hey this is very similar to QQ Mahjong, an online recreational game Tencent. QQ Mahjong was published in 2004 through Tencent’s popular online instant messaging tool QQ. That was way before WeChat came about:

Of course, leisure gaming has evolved a lot since then, and Tencent has now a collection of Mahjong games hosted on different platforms. Also, many copycats came about, with some of them being de facto gambling services.

I then went to check about the background of Remo.co – and realised, their founders are actually from Hong Kong. So no surprise that certain inspiration might have been taken from QQ Mahjong.

It is a pretty good job, and definitely very lucky to have a good product ready with the timing of 2020.