WeChat mini games have now amassed nearly half a billion users

An attendee at WeChat’s annual conference playing a VR version of the mini game Tiao Yi Tiao. / Photo credit: Tech in Asia

I saw my mother sitting in the dark one night, her face illuminated by her smartphone’s screen. She kept tapping on the device as she intently played a game called Tiao Yi Tiao, which means “Jump Jump” in Chinese.

Introduced by WeChat, Tiao Yi Tiao features a stickman that hops from platform to platform, the distance it jumps controlled by how long the player holds their press. If the stickman misses a block, the game is over.

Screenshot of Tiao Yi Tiao

My mother has never been a fan of video games. In fact, the last game that got her hooked or playing at all was Tetris on a handheld console two decades ago.

But WeChat – whose parent company Tencent is the world’s largest gaming firm by revenue – is making video games compelling even for a 50-something woman with Luddite tendencies.

Tiao Yi Tiao accumulated 170 million daily active users within one month of its launch last December, claims WeChat. The number has surged to nearly 390 million as of March, according to research firm QuestMobile. That’s a big chunk of China’s total gaming population of 583 million in 2017.

And this is just the beginning. Tiao Yi Tiao was WeChat’s first ever “mini game” – called as such because its maximum file size is 4 MB. The social giant has subsequently launched 17 more games of this breed and opened up its platform to external developers. Over 500 mini games are now available via the app, according to Tencent’s Q1 earnings report. Together, they have amassed 457 million users.

“I think all of WeChat’s 980 million users are potential mini-game players,” said WeChat mini-games product director Sun Chunguang at the messaging platform’s annual conference last January. WeChat has added 60 million users to its scoreboard since then.

Small but strong

While the messaging giant is still expanding its user base, growth has been on a downtrend. The task now is how to make users stick around.

To do that, WeChat has been transforming itself in recent years from a basic chatting tool into an operating system-like super app with all the daily essentials, ranging from gaming and shopping to food delivery and ride-hailing. To bundle everything together, it’s constantly re-engineering its interface. Its latest move involves offering “mini programs,” or lightweight applications that run inside WeChat and allow users to skip app stores.

See: China leans on Alibaba and Tencent to digitize public services

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