LONDON: ByteDance has announced a significant downsizing of its gaming division following reports of job cuts. The Beijing-based company, known for its ownership of TikTok, ventured into gaming in 2019 to challenge industry leader Tencent but struggled to capture market share. Some active games, like Crystal of Atlan and Earth: Revival, will persist, while unreleased titles will be discontinued by December, impacting potentially hundreds of employees.
A ByteDance spokesperson informed the BBC that the company, in its routine business evaluations, has made the tough choice to restructure its gaming business. Despite ByteDance’s foray into gaming with its Nuverse division in 2019 and acquisitions like C4games to bolster production capacity, none of its games achieved notable commercial success.
This recent move signals ByteDance’s step back from the competitive gaming market, where Tencent stands as the top revenue-generating gaming company globally. ByteDance, established in 2012 and celebrated for creating TikTok with over 1.1 billion active monthly users, has faced scrutiny from various governments, including the US and China. Pressure has mounted for ByteDance to separate TikTok from its operations to avoid potential bans amid concerns about user data security.
