The owner of viral-video app TikTok might be recruiting game developers for its new app and here’s what we know about it

It looks like the Chinese tech giant ByteDance is now taking a major step into mobile gaming by courting European game developers and tech providers.

According to a recent report, the Chinese tech giant firm also sent a few of its executives to a Pocket Gamer Connects conference - an annual gathering of developers, publishers, and investors of mobiles games which was held in London on Monday.

According to the listing of a private-networking tool seen by Business Insider, the executives of the owner of TikTok met a variety of local developers, publishers and technology providers during the conference held in London.

According to inside by Business Insider, some of the executives included in the list of attendees of the conference were recently hired in the year 2020 which can only mean one thing that ByteDance of the viral-video app TikTok is now ramping up into games.

During the conference, the overseas director of the business department of ByteDance was seen speaking to some of the game developers regarding the revenue generation of mobile games through funded ads and also about the rise in the hypercasual games as well.

Even though there is no official statement from the overseas director but the hints he left pretty much state that the company is sure thinking about Instant game-style platform for its users as they are lightweight and can easily be opened directly inside another app without any issue at all.

We think the owner of TikTok is pretty much trying to also include instant games in its platforms as Snapchat also allows us to run games inside the app via Snap Games whereas the Instant Games of Facebook enable its users to play with the News Feed or the Messenger app.

When Van Dam was asked regarding TikTok’s aim to launch some Instant games within the app he declined to comment but also stated that other platforms involved in instant gaming have not done any good work with some efficient results so now years later, the company should come with better-improved versions of instant games for its users.

During the discussion regarding the regulatory issues of Chinese with Western developers, Van Dam also dropped some hint for its viewers that it's difficult for western developers to bring games to China as game companies are required to have licenses to launch its apps if their apps include some money-making methods in the game apps.

According to Van Dam, this type of restriction isn’t applicable to the hypercasual games which are ad-funded. This restriction is only limited to traditional developers with in-app purchases. He also stated that the western developers should focus on the hypercasual-gaming market and probably partner with someone in order to drive huge traffic on its hypercasual games.

Despite the decline by Van Dam of not being involved in advertising for ByteDance his statements pretty much revealed that ByteDance might help developers up their market of mobile games through its popular apps.

According to the reports from the industry, ByteDance might also be considering the involvement of lightweight instant apps into the viral-video sharing platform TikTok which means the users of this platform could easily play some lightweight casual games within the app without using any third-party app at all.

It is also heard that ByteDance is also planning to launch some standalone mobile games as well.

According to a 2019 report from an App Annie, for three quarters, the Chinese gamer consumers spent more than $30 billion on mobile games on app stores during 2018 whereas leading on the second with half that amount were the consumers of the US.

From all these statements and insights on ByteDance, it is pretty much clear that the Chinese tech giant wants to generate revenue in games but through its own in-app games without sharing any of its revenue to the services of apps of Apple or Google.


Photo: Imaginechina / AP

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