Name: Report: Trump admin looking into Tencent’s US gaming investments
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Report: Trump admin looking into Tencent’s US gaming investments

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The US government is reportedly scrutinizing Chinese tech giant Tencent and the US gaming companies in which it has an investment interest. that the Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) has asked companies including Epic Games and Riot Games to answer questions about their data-security standards, according to "people familiar with the matter."CFIUS has the authority to when those investments could have an impact on national security. Historically, that has often meant examining foreign access to US natural resources or military secrets. More recently, though, CFIUS has taken an expanded interest in potential foreign access to US customer data.“When you’re talking about massive amounts of data, there’s probably something for the committee to look at,” former Treasury Department Deputy Assistant Secretary for Investment Security Aimen Mir told Bloomberg yesterday. “The question then becomes is the risk high enough that it actually warrants forcing deals apart?”CFIUS' investigation comes amid the Trump administration's moves against Chinese social media apps TikTok and WeChat, the latter of which is owned by Tencent. After in August, Trump has demanded they be . TikTok owner ByteDance is currently to possibly avoid these sanctions.Representatives for Epic and Riot were not immediately available to respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica.Originally focused on licensing Western games for the Chinese market, Tencent has slowly increased its investment in non-Chinese companies over the years. The company has owned 93 percent of League of Legends developer Riot Games since 2011 (and ) and 40 percent of Epic Games since 2012. The conglomerate also owns majority shares in Clash of Clans developer Supercell and Path of Exile developer Grinding Gear Games, as well as smaller shares in companies , Activision Blizzard, Funcom, Discord, and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds maker Bluehole.These ownership stakes have occasionally aroused suspicions among some conspiracy-minded gamers, who worry that the Chinese government is collecting their gaming information or spying on their computers via Tencent's influence on these companies."Epic does not share user data with Tencent or any other company," Epic CEO and co-founder Tim Sweeney said in response to such concerns . "We don’t share it, sell it, or broker access to it for advertising like so many other companies do. I’m the founder and controlling shareholder of Epic and would never allow this to happen.""Tencent is a significant, but minority shareholder in Epic," Sweeney added in months later. "I'm the controlling shareholder of Epic... The decisions Epic makes are ultimately my decisions, made here in North Carolina based on my beliefs as a game developer about what the game industry needs!"Last year, Riot Games to not include “personal views on sensitive topics (political, religious or otherwise)” in their broadcasts. A spokesperson for the company at the time that the longstanding policy was worth repeating “in light of the ongoing situation in Hong Kong and the current global political environment.”You must to comment.

The US government is reportedly scrutinizing Chinese tech giant Tencent and the US gaming companies in which it has an investment interest. that the Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) has asked companies including Epic Games and Riot Games to answer questions about their data-security standards, according to "people familiar with the matter."CFIUS has the authority to when those investments could have an impact on national security. Historically, that has often meant examining foreign access to US natural resources or military secrets. More recently,...

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Kyle Orland is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. Kyle has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland and has previously written for Joystiq, Crispy Gamer, Gamasutra, MSNBC, NPR, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Gamespot, and The Escapist, among others. His latest book, The Game Beat, collects two decades of columns examining the way game are covered in the mass media.

https://arstechnica.com/author/kyle-orland/

Kyle Orland

Ars Technica is a website covering news and opinions in technology, science, politics, and society, created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews, and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, science, technology policy, and video games. Many of the site's writers are postgraduates and some work for research institutions. Articles on the website are written in a less-formal tone than those in traditional journals. Ars Technica was privately owned until May 2008, when it was sold to Condé Nast Digital, the online division of Condé Nast Publications.

Report: Trump admin looking into Tencent’s US gaming investments

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