Will Trump’s order to ban Tencent transactions affect Riot and Epic Games? Gamers upset about industry's future

Will Trump’s order to ban Tencent transactions affect Riot and Epic Games? Gamers upset about industry's future
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Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday, August 6, to block all transactions with ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok in 45 days. The President stated, “national emergency with respect to the information and communications technology and services supply chain”. Only a few days ago Microsoft announced that they were planning on acquiring TikTok operations in the US region.

Trump signed a follow-up executive order to WeChat, stating, “WeChat automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users —threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans' personal and proprietary information.“ WeChat is owned by China-based multinational Tencent. Moreover, Tencent was the only other product called out by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo besides TikTok while he alleged that some Asian companies are “feeding data directly to the Chinese Communist Party," reports BBC. 

The Chinese app offers a range of functions including messaging, social media, online payments and gaming. Tencent is also popular among the gaming society, as it owns both Riot and Epic Games, American video game and software developers who have created games such as ‘League of Legends’ and ‘Fortnite’. 

Riot Games operates in over 24 offices worldwide. It had an estimated 100 million active users a month in September 2016, and in 2019, the company revealed that the game boats around eight million concurrent users each day. Meanwhile, the Epic Games amassed 108 million registered users as of January 2020, according to The Verge. 

The impending ban on WeChat has got the Internet users worried as they express concerns over Riot and Epic Games of Tencent facing the consequences of the new order. "So fuck tencent but if tencent is banned this could cause a games industry crash in the US again, guys look at how fucking much they own this is legitimately scary," said a user.

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One user tweeted, "I believe Tencent owns 50% of Epic Games, which is the developers and publishers of Fortnite so wouldn't it affect them? Correct me if I'm wrong because I haven't done much research lol"