League of Legends

Riot

The chaos of the TikTok ban is currently unfolding across the US with the app erased either temporarily or permanently depending on how all this plays out. The gaming angle here is that somehow, Marvel Snap caught a stray because its publisher is ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, and it was also unexpectedly taken offline.

There has been a lot of talk about how if the US government can vote to ban an entire social network from the country, they might do that with other social networks if they don’t like what they’re doing, even perhaps US-based ones. But I’m wondering about what happens if they stay with the Chinese angle, particularly if they turn their attention toward one of the biggest players in the video game industry.

That would be Tencent, the Chinese mega-corporation that owns or has a piece of extremely huge video games publishers and developers with some of the biggest games in the world, but also in the US specifically. Given that Congress and the government in general often seems widely disconnected with the things they are regulating, a move like this does not seem impossible.

The narrative around ByteDance was that it was a potential national security risk due to be a Chinese company widely distributing an app around the country. While there is no specific Tencent “app” like TikTok per se, the claim here could be that Tencent being intimately involved with loads of major games that US citizens, and particularly children, are playing might be a “harmful” Chinese influence, or something along those lines. Plus, the US Defense Department has just said it believes Tencent has ties to the Chinese military. Tencent disputed that immediately:

“As the company is neither a Chinese military company nor a military-civil fusion contributor to the Chinese defense industrial base, it believes that its inclusion in the CMC List is a mistake,” Tencent said in an announcement to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, after shares of the company fell 7.3%. This happened…literally 12 days ago.

Fortnite

Epic

If Tencent is targeted, it’s hard to understate just how hard it would be to extract that company from the video game industry in a way that wouldn’t be devastating.

• Tencent owns 100% of Riot Games, maker of League of Legends and Valorant.
• Tencent owns significant stakes in Supercell, maker or Clash of Clans and Clash Royale, and Grinding Gear Games, maker of Path of Exile.
• Tencent has 29% of fully diluted shares of Epic, maker of Fortnite and the builder and licenser of the widely used Unreal Engine.
• Tencent has minority stakes in Ubisoft, Bluehole, Remedy, Platinum Games and more.

Clash Royale

Supercell

Again, you might imagine how the US could demand that Chinese company divest/sell its stakes in either US companies or companies distributing games in the US, or risk banning those games. At the very least, League of Legends and Valorant, the ones they 100% own. This would have sounded extremely far-fetched a year ago, but given that government regulators have shuttered a social network with 170 million US users, it does not seem impossible. And of course there are other Chinese studios with big games in the US, like HoYoverse’s Genshin Impact or NetEase, which makes a lot of different games including most recently, the explosively popular Marvel Rivals.

Is it likely something like this would come to pass? Perhaps not, but if the government ends up understanding just how integrated Chinese companies into a huge number of major US video games, most played by children, that may raise alarms. For now, I’m not sure they have any idea.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.