Now the Chinese gaming industry is dominated by Tencent and NetEase. However, now ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has launched its own store and plans to compete with them by independently developing and releasing projects.Own store and publishing house
ByteDance announced the launch of the game store in October.
It’s called Danjuan Games and will focus only on mobile games. Now it already has a lot of casual projects.
In November, the company also opened a publishing division Pixmain, according to the South China Morning Post. Now he plans to have five indie games that will be released on mobile devices. At the same time, three of them will also appear on the PC, and one (Grimvalor) will receive a port on the Nintendo Switch.
How can ByteDance compete with other holdings?In addition to the publishing house and the store, the company has already launched three game studios — Nuverse, PixDance and Ohayoo.
They all specialize in different projects: Nuverse and PixDance develop midcore and hardcore games, and Ohayoo focuses on casual titles.
Thus, ByteDance plans to cover all the main categories of games at once and attract a different age audience. The company plans not only to create its own projects, but also to purchase new studios and release games from third-party developers.
One of the main advantages of ByteDance is TikTok (and its Chinese version Douyin). With it, the company will be able to attract users to its games — just like Tencent does with WeChat.
Finally, in September, ByteDance announced a large-scale recruitment of new employees. The company has opened 700 business vacancies and another 200 technical vacancies in the field of development.
The first failures and successesIn June, it was reported that the Art of War: Infinity Evolution and JJ Street Basket projects, on which ByteDance had high hopes, failed.
Then the company unexpectedly bought the rights to publish the popular game Naruto: Slugfest from Tencent.
At the same time, Ohayoo, known for the Virus War project, has become one of the fastest growing studios in China. Over the past 18 months, she has released nine casual games, each of which brought in at least $15.2 million.
What do experts think about ByteDance’s plans?”ByteDance invests in all areas of the video game industry to strengthen its position as a major player in the market,” says Zeng Xiaofeng, vice president of Niko Partners.
He also believes that the key to the company’s success can be short TikTok-style videos through which ByteDance will be able to promote its projects and engage users.
According to Chundi Zhang, an analyst at Ampere Analysis, ByteDance plans to focus on casual and hyper-casual games, since it will be difficult for it to compete with Tencent and NetEase in other areas.
Chundi believes that Danjuan Games can become a platform like Steam, which combines a store and a user community.
Also on the topic:
- ByteDance plans to raise $2 billion with a total valuation of $180 billionThe US authorities will challenge the temporary ban on TikTok
- ByteDance is preparing an Honor of Kings competitor and is reshuffling personnel in this regard
- Is there any news?
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