President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to ban TikTok and transactions with parent company of WeChat on Thursday night. This order may not directly state any direct restrictions posed on gaming industry but the implications are disastrous.
The ban order will be effective in the next 45 days and the restrictions over TikTok could be no surprise but a ban on any sort of transactions with Tencent caught everyone by surprise.
The ban was directly aimed at WeChat and imposed inder the pretext of “data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information”, according to the official orders.
The ban orders vaguely state that “any transaction that is related to WeChat by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, with Tencent Holdings Ltd. … Shenzhen, China, or any subsidiary of that entity.” will be prohibited and it is yet unclear if the ban is only limited to WeChat or imposed on the entirety of Tencent, which owns stakes in many game developers around the world.
Tencent has ownership stakes in big US companies like Riot Games which published titles like League of Legends, Valorant and awaited mobile game Wild Rift; Epic Games which owns world famous battle-royale “Fortnite”; Activision Blizzard.
