After a TikTok ban, could Gaming Overlord Tencent be targeted next?

The chaos of the TikTok ban is currently unfolding across the US with the app either temporarily or permanently deleted depending on how this all works out. The angle at play here is that somehow, Marvel Snap caught a miss because its publisher is ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, and it was also suddenly taken offline.

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

That would be Tencent, the Chinese mega-corporation that owns or has a stake in extremely large video game publishers and developers with some of the biggest games in the world, but also in the US especially. Given that Congress and the government at large often seem widely out of touch with the things they’re fixing, a move like this doesn’t seem out of the question.

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

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

If Tencent is targeted, it’s hard to underestimate how difficult it would be to get that company out of the video game industry in a way that wouldn’t be disruptive.

• Tencent owns 100% of Riot Games, creator of League of Legends and Valorant.
• Tencent owns significant stakes in Supercell, creator or Clash of Clans and Clash Royale, and Grinding Gear Games, creator of Path of Exile.
• Tencent has a 40% stake in Epic, the maker of Fortnite and the builder and licensor of the widely used Unreal Engine.
• Tencent has minority stakes in Ubisoft, Bluehole, Remedy, Platinum Games and more.

Again, you can imagine how the US could demand that the Chinese company divest/sell its shares in either US companies or companies that distribute US games, or risk banning those games. At least League of Legends and Valorant, the ones they own 100%. That would have sounded extremely far-fetched a year ago, but given that government regulators have shut down a social network with 170 million US users, it doesn’t seem impossible. And of course there are other Chinese studios with big games in the US, like Genshin Impact or HoYoverse’s NetEase, which produces many different games, including most recently, the hugely popular Marvel Rivals.

Is she LIKELY would something like this happen? Probably not, but if the government ends up figuring out how Chinese companies are integrated into a large number of major American video games, most of which are played by children, it could raise alarms. Right now, I’m not sure they have any idea.

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