ByteDance, the creator of TikTok, announced the indie publisher Pixmain.
In October, ByteDance launched a new mobile game store called Danjuan Games, full of casual games. This month, the company announced a new publisher called Pixmain at the WePlay Game Expo in Shanghai.
The new publisher is currently working on five mobile games to publish in the Chinese market. Three of the games will also take place on PC and one on the Switch platform.
The new studios Danjuan and Pixmain will join the three game studios ByteDance already owns: Nuverse, PixDance and Ohayoo. While Ohayoo focuses on hypercasual games, Nuverse and PixDance focus on mid-core and hardcore games of varying complexity.
The South China Morning Post stated that ByteDance is keen to compete with Chinese giants Tencent and NetEase by leveraging the huge user base of TikTok and its Chinese counterpart, Douyin.
ByteDance has been expanding its gaming operations in recent years as it seeks new ways to monetizing the attention of its users. According to analysts, the firm follows a similar path to Tencent.
“ByteDance also has an advantage with Douyin and TikTok as it is able to acquire users in a similar way to how Tencent does with WeChat and QQ,” said Zeng Xiaofeng, vice-president of Niko Partners.
