Advertisement
Video gaming
TechBig Tech

TikTok owner ByteDance makes biggest public commitment yet to Tencent video game rivalry with launch of stand-alone site for Nuverse

  • The video game market has become hugely lucrative in recent years, with both Big Tech and high-powered start-ups aggressively building up their gaming units
  • Nuverse’s previous titles struggled to live up to expectations, but it is only a matter of time before it comes up with a hit game

Reading Time:2 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
0
The ByteDance logo is seen on its headquarters building in Beijing on July 8, 2020. Photo: AFP
Josh Ye

ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, has pushed its flagship gaming studio Nuverse to centre stage by launching a stand-alone website for the development and publishing team, a sign of its commitment to gaming as the Beijing-based unicorn seeks to profit from its vast user base and challenge arch rival Tencent.

Although Nuverse, led by a former Tencent executive, was established in 2019, the roll-out of the new website – which lists all the gaming titles from the studio – represents one of ByteDance’s biggest public commitments to video game development. Last month, the company did a soft launch of a new cloud gaming platform called Aoligame.

The ambitions of ByteDance in video games, a highly competitive but profitable business, have become clearer with its aggressive hiring of talent. Analysts said the company’s gaming strategy is taking a page out of Tencent’s playbook of funnelling social media traffic into games to create monetisation opportunities. An earlier report by the tech-focused Chinese online media 36Kr said ByteDance had about 2,000 gaming developers at the end of 2020, double the number from 2019.

While Nuverse titles such as Eden No Tobira, Strike Royale and Arena of Evolution: Red Tides are not in the same league as Tencent cash cows like Honour of Kings, which was the world’s No 1 online game in terms of revenue in January, ByteDance said it wants to expand worldwide by offering “top-tier games” and build a “global community, providing fun and inspiring experiences for every gamer”.

The video games market has become hugely lucrative in recent years, with Big Tech in China and high-powered start-ups aggressively building up their gaming units. What was once a two-horse race between Tencent and NetEase is now shaping up to be a heavily contested market with new heavyweights like ByteDance, Alibaba Group Holding (owner of the South China Morning Post), and miHoYo, makers of surprise-hit Genshin Impact.

Advertisement