Two years without a breakthrough. TikTok owner is shutting down his ambitious gaming business
November 27, 01:42 Share:
ByteDance closes its gaming business (Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic)
The Chinese company ByteDance, which owns the wildly popular TikTok app, is shutting down its video game development project called Nuverse.
Nuverse became one of the company's core business units at the end of 2021. But during this time, not a single popular product was created and no significant commercial success was achieved.
Against this background, ByteDance, as Reuters writes, began mass layoffs of employees. The publication's sources report that ByteDance will soon announce the complete winding down of its gaming brand Nuverse and a complete departure from video games.
At the same time, ByteDance representatives did not confirm the existence of such plans in a comment to TechCrunch.
“We regularly review our business and make adjustments to focus on long-term strategic areas of development. Following a recent review, we have made the difficult decision to restructure our gaming business,” the company said.
Already in 2021, Nuverse employed about 3,000 people, and this number has not undergone significant changes. Exactly how many workers will be laid off remains unclear.
To recap, Nuverse was launched in 2019 as a video game publishing company.. In 2021, the company launched its first game outside of mainland China – mobile online strategy Warhammer 40,000: Lost Crusade. Subsequently, the studio launched the card game Marvel Snap, the PvP shooter Mission EVO, and the strategy Land of Empires: Immortal. Most of these games have over a million downloads on Google Play but have not achieved significant success.
Read also: Chinese company ByteDance values TikTok at $60 billion Heading towards the USA and Britain. TikTok is restructuring Apple's e-commerce division and Spotify, move over. The creators of TikTok have released their music streaming service
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