A little backstory: Not long ago, President Trump has issued a ban on a few Chinese applications available in the US. These apps were TikTok and WeChat.
The threats were that these Chinese-owned applications tend to misuse and invade the privacy and data collected from US citizens. The question then arose on whether Trump will ban other similar digital applications and games, which are Chinese.
The games mentioned were both League of Legends and Fortnite.
So, is Trump really banning Fortnite?
Is Trump Banning Fortnite?
Even though many know that Epic Games and Riot Games were both US, a company based in China has a lot of stake in these companies.
The firm is called Tencent. It is a major multinational conglomerate company which had a revenue of more than 380 billion last year. The firm is investing a lot in the gaming industry, for example, gaming developing companies like Ubisoft, Blizzard, Supercell, Bluehole, and many others.
Epic Games, Fortnite’s developers, were issued a request from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US. The request was to clarify how, why, and what data they collect from US citizens.
In 2019, Fortnite brought $1.8 billion in revenues.
Along with Epic Games, Riot Games were also asked to provide these details to the CFIUS. This process will play a massive role in deciding whether Trump will ban Fortnite and League of Legends.
Most importantly, the government’s brief statement indicates that they will be looking more into Tencent, and it will undoubtedly impact some of their divisions.
However, nothing particular was said about gaming firms. Most analysts speculate that this is highly unlikely since these game companies collect only a fraction of data that the applications had collected.
Nevertheless, we will have to wait and see and hope that these game companies ethically collect our data. Because Ubisoft and Blizzard can be affected two, and those are some big names in the gaming industry.
Lastly, this could be detrimental to the eSport and gaming industry. We have seen a steady compound rise in these industries, and we can only speculate on the effect these kinds of decisions would bring.
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