Tiktok parent company ByteDance spends much time expanding into gaming, one of the largest gaming firms in the world, Tencent, beyond its blockbuster video app. ByteDance began buying small gaming firms in 2017, but paid 4 billion dollars to buy Moonton on, a former Tencent employee based in Shanghai that gave Mobile Legends a tent-pole franchise. Also, offering them 30 to 50 percent wage increases, according to three Tencent and NetEase game developers, who added that most of their colleagues had also been approached by Byte Dance’s headhunters during the last two years.
The outcome of their gaming strategy will be Bytedance, most important of one to two years. The company has been facing the challenge of building a reputation that is strong enough to build the best talent and game partners. The game is pushed as ByteDance begins to diversify from advertising. ByteDance has already won 27% of the Chinese advertising market by other applications.
“ByteDance looks very much like Tencent, many applications draw large user traffic, but they have to find a way to monetize the traffic. This means more advertising, gaming, or e-commerce products. Advertising is consolidated, they need to find another thing,” said Zhang Hua, Chinese International Business School Associate Professor of Finance in Shanghai. Expanding into play is also the way to stop Tencent’s dominance of China’s social media platforms by stopping them from broadcasting games under the Empire of Tencent.
ByteDance must expand by persuading others to partner with it, and by publishing third-party games without the legacies of a strong internal game development unit. His gaming teams were mainly poached by the game developer Perfect World, based in Tencent and NetEase. ByteDance has a lot to offer, as well as high basic wages, and their social media apps draw the most user hours of all Chinese apps. The first half of 2020 saved about 73 minutes per day for these two application users and they were able to provide many adverts to drive user traffic in their games.
“The creation of good content depends on well-coordinated teams who understand how to create, and that’s not a sector where you can only get all your best employees from other enterprises and play well,” said Liao Xuhua, online entertainment sector Analyst.
Their Would-be recruits share these reservations concerning ByteDance’s well-proven gaming strategy. While a high ByteDance base salary is flashy, industry salaries are highly dependent on year-end bonuses up to the 10-month salary, depending on the success of games. “They have been in the industry for few years, but there are no results in the category ‘heavyweight”, one former Tencent player said, referring to multi-player arena-style battle games in the high spend high-user time category.
However, analysts and game developers have said that byteDance fragmentation in a game market provides niches for the growing, casual games that are less time-consuming, open-world games that can be explored by the user at a relaxing pace as opposed to combat games. “Their main challenge is not their patience, the market or their competitors. Alibaba has been making some fine games for over seven years,” Liao said. In the space of a few years, ByteDance will have to change gaming gears for a company.
Tiktok and its creator ByteDance look at more than the use and consumption of content in the gaming community. Bloomberg said the company is ready to challenge the domination of the non-productive titles of Tencent Holdings mobile gaming market.
