TikTok reportedly plan a major push into gaming with new tests in Vietnam

TikTok has reportedly been planning a major push into gaming, with tests taking place in Vietnam.

The games that are embed within TikTok can boost advertising revenue as well as the amount of time users spend on the app, which has already amassed more than 1 billion monthly active users.

TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, also plan to expand gaming businesses widely in Southeast Asia, sources told Reuters.

A TikTok representative said ByteDance has tested bringing HTML5 games to its app through partnership with third-party game developers and studios such as Zynga Inc.

In the United State, TikTok has already announced a partnership with FarmVille developer Zynga late last year to develop Disco Loco 3D.

Users of Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, have been able to play games within the app since 2019.

In February 2019, Douyin released its first in-app mini game and Jinri Toutiao, Bytedance’s owned news aggregator app had pre-marketed the mini games on its personalized news distribution platform at the time.

With 700 million monthly active users (MAUs), Douyin has already gained enough audiences to support its own games, many of Douyin’s users have already seen in-stream ads for games on the video app, which is a popular marketing channel for ByteDance’s mini games and third-party game developers.

In October 2020, ByteDance also secretly set up a new game developing project so called Oasis, and the company has been embarking on a massive recruiting for its Oasis project. The Oasis project team so far has more than 200 employees with a special focus on developing nine demo games.

The video games market has become hugely lucrative in recent years as Big tech including ByteDance, Alibaba and miHoYo have been racing to aggressively develop their gaming units.