TikTok has already taken over the world. Millions of people (myself included…) spend far too many hours on the popular video-sharing app, watching thousands of bite-sized, often very funny clips created by other users. And now, seemingly in an effort to suck away the few remaining hours of your day, the company behind it is currently testing how to integrate games directly into the app.
This news comes via a report from Reuters published yesterday that details TikTok and parent company ByteDance’s plans to add video games to the video-sharing service. And you might not have to wait too long to play games on it. It’s reported that over in Vietnam users have had access to games for some time now, as the app is using its younger, tech-savvy audience there as a test market.
Reuters’ sources say TikTok plans to roll out games to more parts of Southeast Asia later this year.
Technically speaking, TikTok has featured a few small games in the past, including a game from Zynga called Disco Loco 3D. But this upcoming expansion of the platform’s gaming capabilities will draw games from ByteDance’s already-large library of mobile diversions. Meanwhile, a different subsidiary of that company recently announced Marvel Snap, a free-to-play card game from the creators of Hearthstone. So perhaps there’s a future in which these types of bigger, more advanced mobile games become widely playable through TikTok itself.
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Just in case you were wondering how the company was going to make money on all this, TikTok’s games will reportedly feature ads; ByteDance will pocket a percentage of the profits with the rest going to the devs. No specifics on how this split will break down were shared.
As noted by Reuters, folks using ByteDance’s Douyin, the separate, Chinese version of TikTok, have been playing games inside their version of the video-sharing app since 2019.
TikTok is just the latest example of a non-gaming company trying to shove some games into its already-popular apps and services. Netflix has recently begun to add games to its app as part of a larger push into gaming.
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