TikTok has found a new idea to increase its income and its audience: to offer many small video games on its application. According to sources interviewed by our colleagues at Reutersthe social network would be carrying out tests in Vietnam, because 70% of the population of this country is under 35 years old and constitutes an ideal target.
Vietnam has a strict video game policy, which prohibits violence, sexual content and betting. But the majority of mini games are pretty innocent and don’t fit into those categories.
The objective would be to carry out in the third quarter a massive deployment of games sponsored by advertising in Southeast Asia. And no need to go very far for the choice of games since TikTok should draw mainly from the catalog of its parent company ByteDance.
A TikTok spokesperson said the publisher was testing HTML5 games, but did not confirm the Vietnam trial campaign or the publisher’s ambitions in this area.
However, this is not the first time that TikTok has ventured into the realm of games. In the United States, the social network has partnered with the Zynga studio to offer the dance game Disco Loco 3D.
TikTok also launched with the organization Feeding America the charity mini game Garden of Good, which consists of growing vegetables to earn points and then turn them into donations. Users of Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, still published by ByteDance, have been accessing video games since 2019.
The ad-sponsored video game market is juicy and ByteDance wants its piece of the pie. Because the competition has already started with Instant Games, from Facebook, and the gaming offer from Netflix.
According to our colleagues from TechCrunch, TikTok is even considering including games in live-streamed videos to provide more interactivity. For example, creators could play a guessing game, like Pictionary, with viewers, or even share their screen.
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Last September, TikTok announced that it had passed the threshold of one billion monthly users worldwide. This is huge potential for the future offering of ad-sponsored games and ByteDance does not intend to miss this opportunity.
Source : Reuters