ByteDance, the company behind the successful app TikTok and its Chinese counterpart Douyin, now wants to enter the MMO market. After collaborating with Fortnite, the company plans to create its own games. Apparently, ByteDance aims to take on the competitor Tencent.
What is TikTok planning? According to a report by the South China Morning Post, ByteDance is now planning “Massively Multiplayer Online Games” with elements of Chinese fantasy.
To this end, the company has acquired several studios and hired people, including industry veteran Wang Kuiwi, who comes from the Chinese developer Perfect World Games (“Perfect World Mobile”, one of the best mobile MMORPGs of 2020).
Details about what kind of games they will be are still not available. However, they are expected to be “non-casual games” that should establish a presence both in China and abroad, that is, in Europe or America.
TikTok is now making MMOs – Why?
What’s behind it: With this initiative, ByteDance now wants to gain a foothold in the gaming industry, similar to what Amazon is doing with New World. Unlike Amazon, however, ByteDance had to finance itself through advertising in the apps.
The apparent goal is to challenge Tencent’s dominance. Tencent is a huge Chinese internet company and one of the “most valuable companies in the world” (via Wikipedia).
ByteDance and Tencent have been in competition for some time. In 2018, there was even a lawsuit (via SCMP).
Tencent owns shares in Activision Blizzard (World of Warcraft, Call of Duty) and Epic Games (Fortnite), as well as newly also Funcom (Conan Exiles). The giant also owns the studio Riot Games (League of Legends).
ByteDance has previously attempted to establish itself in the gaming sector with the casual mobile game “Music Jumping Ball”. However, it was released on Douyin and therefore had no success in the West. The upcoming games are expected to change that.
The huge success of TikTok
What is TikTok anyway? TikTok is an app where users can create short video clips of themselves and share them directly. What’s special is that they can react to other clips with their own and directly create “reaction TikToks”, leading to sometimes long chains and reactions.
How is TikTok doing right now? The TikTok app has enjoyed great popularity for some time now. According to Google Trends, there was a sudden boom in interest in Germany in September 2019. The reason was the merger of TikTok with the teen app Musical.ly.
After the peak flattened out, TikTok has become increasingly interesting for (especially young) users and has become more popular. There is still no end in sight to the growth. The “TikTok generation” has since also conquered Twitch.
Last year, TikTok even managed to accumulate more active users than Twitch. According to FutureBiz, over 5.5 million Germans were actively using TikTok by the end of 2019. On Twitch, there are only 3.2 million (via Statista).
The numbers for global comparison are even larger. The website BasicThinking states that over 800 million people worldwide now use TikTok. However, Instagram (one billion users) and YouTube (1.9 billion users) are still ahead of TikTok.
According to Oberlo’s news portal, an app to support the purchase of goods including from China, TikTok had already achieved 1.5 billion downloads by the end of 2019 and is the most downloaded app from the Apple App Store.
Recently, TikTok has planned a collaboration with Fortnite. Here, players will have the opportunity to bring their own dance into the game, if they upload it to TikTok with the corresponding hashtag beforehand:
