According to a new job ad posted on its website, ByteDance is looking to fill dozens of technology- and business-related positions, including 3D modelers, instructional designers, character concept artists, technical artists, game designers, narrative designers, copywriters, and more, to help its growing gaming sector. The jobs will mainly belong to the company's game studios ,"Zhaoxi Guangnian Information Technology" or "Nuverse Game," which launched in February last year with branches in Beijing, Hangzhou and Shanghai.
An unidentified employee posted a screenshot of ByteDance's remote collaboration app Feishu, showing an internal discussion between the company's CEOs. Zhang Yiming and other employees about developing an open-world gacha game similar to Genshin.
ByteDance has not yet issued an official announcement on investment initiatives; However, Zhang Yiming's interest in developing open-world gacha games has been around for some time.
Genshin Impact has taken the world by storm since its release last year. It was the second-highest-selling game, earning $60 million across all mobile platforms in the first week after its release, surpassing PUBG Mobile and behind Honor of King, which cashed out $64 million.
As Sensor Tower's latest data shows, the game's overseas sales in January 2022 increased by 51% month-on-month, making it the highest-grossing Chinese mobile game in overseas markets that month. Genshin Impact's revenue this month was $208.7 million, coming from in-game purchases by gamers in 2022, up 37 percent year-over-year, according to Sensor Tower. Because of those numbers, the game ranked third in revenue in January, behind Tencent's PUBG Mobile and Honor of Kings.
Genshin Impact has one of the largest gaming communities, and its members often spark heated debates on social media about a variety of game-related topics. According to the Twitter blog, Genshin Impact is the most tweeted game of 2021.
In recent years, ByteDance has rapidly expanded the scope of its gaming business as it looks for new ways to monetize user engagement while taking advantage of one of China's most lucrative markets.
Danjuan, Nurverse, ZX Light Year, Ohayoo, Pixmain, PixDance, Relaternity are game brands owned by ByteDance that are engaged in the development and distribution of core games in domestic and foreign markets, including but not limited to mobile, casual, open world online and indie games.
The company is increasingly entering the gaming industry to increase its visibility and build ecosystems through methods such as acquiring game studios, building communities through its own social media platforms such as Douyin, and licensing third-party content.
With 500 million monthly active users (MCUs), Douyin has played an important role in marketing ByteDance's casual and indie games through in-app advertising and increased engagement by allowing users to play games in the app's mini-programs.
In addition to acquiring gaming studios, ByteDance has also made significant investments in the entire gaming industry value chain in an attempt to challenge industry leaders such as Tencent and NetEase by cannibalizing market share.
The company also hosted the inaugural Global Game Developer Competition to help international game developers expand in China through their distribution and marketing channels.
The success of Genshin Impact also presented a major challenge for Tencent, as MiHoYo distributed the game through its own website and various third-party platforms, thus largely bypassing Tencent's ecosystem and threatening the company's revenue streams.
Tencent has had historic success in genres such as Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA), first-person shooters, and battle royale. Still, the company has yet to take the top spot in emerging genres such as open-world role-playing games and anime-style 2D games (also known as erciyuan or Gacha in English). It has been trying to fend off MiHoYo by developing itself or by signing exclusive partnerships to adapt anime IP (intellectual property) into games, thus expanding in these areas. In 2021, Tencent released two trailers for "Glory of Kings: World" and "Sword and Snow Stride", with a clear intention to bring its own version of the open-world game to players around the world.
Los Angeles-based LightSpeed Studio, managed by Triple A game veteran Steve Martin, is hiring a team of various technical positions, including senior environmental artists and senior character concept artists, to create a triple A open world game.
Open-world games could be key to the success of Metavalse and its core pillars, while games like Roblox and Pokémon Go set an example by showing what a 3D virtual world would look like by providing good examples of different combinations of augmented reality versus open-world concepts and their successful applications.
We've seen Tencent try to leverage meta-border-like strategies, such as building a virtual economy connected to the real world by selling branded content and avatar skins in its mobile games, such as Glory of Kings.
To maintain its presence in metaverse, MiHoYo launched a virtual brand called HoYoverse, which aims to create a vast content-driven online world that combines games, anime, and various other types of entertainment.