To be specific, Riot Games sold the full 100% to Tencent. Tencent owns partial shares in a lot of companies; when it comes to Riot Games / League of Legends, that percentage is the full 100.
that's a very short-term/literal view of the situation. Obviously any American company at the end of the day can physically do what it wants if it resides in the US, but if you want to have long term access to the Chinese market or capital it becomes significantly more of a strategic issue. Just look at the university conflicts in Australia.
if you want to have long term access to the Chinese market
I think people are starting to cotton on that there is no such thing. The best you can hope is for a few years of getting a local partner familiar with your IP before they boot you out.
Number one, the US has basically declared economic war on Venezuela. The government is preventing anyone from coming to the US to do anything to control Citgo. Notice that the Citgo situation still depended on them declaring bankruptcy and then some mix of legal and political maneuvering to get a new board installed. But Citgo is a huge important energy company, not a video game company, and our relationship with Venezuela is much worse than our relationship with China. Despite the trade war and tough talk I can't imagine that LoL is the hill that the Trump admin would use to escalate things. Matt Levine's point is that the people who control the company are the ones with the keys to the office and if you have the political will you can use law enforcement to give control to the people that you want. But from the perspective of Venezuela/China, it's tantamount to the US seizing control of a foreign corporation and would be a huge escalation.
Number two, Citgo does not care about ongoing access to Venezuela (plus due to sanctions it's not like they have an economic relationship with Venezuela at the moment anyway). Their customers are not in Venezuela, their customers are in America. And they don't need to source oil from Venezuela, oil is a global commodity. Finally, there is a chance of leadership change in Venezuela. So you have scenario one, Maduro keeps control of Venezuela and nothing changes for Citgo (Venezuela now hates them but it doesn't matter because that relationship was already severed) but now Citgo is officially independent. Or scenario two, Guaido gets control and Citgo is embraced by the new leadership that they supported from the beginning.
For Riot, things are totally different. They currently have access to the Chinese market and don't want to lose that access. Sure, maybe they could convince a judge to let them appoint an American board and remove Chinese control, but if that were to happen China would just sever access to the Chinese market.
