Zheping Huang · · 3 min readRivalry between Chinese social media giants intensifies in battle over mini games
Douyin, the viral short-video app run by Bytedance, has launched its first mini game, built on top of a new feature that allows users to play games inside the app without having to download them separately.
The move will intensify the social media rivalry between Bytedance and Tencent Holdings, China’s biggest games publisher, as mini games are being added to apps in the battle to win over a bigger share of the country’s mercurial millennials.
Photo credit: Tech in Asia
Mini games were pioneered by Tencent’s WeChat – China’s answer to WhatsApp that has morphed into an all-in-one app with over 1 billion monthly active users who talk, play games, shop, read news, pay for meals and post their thoughts and pictures online.
In December 2017, WeChat released its mini game function within the app, and among the most popular offerings was a platform-jumping game called Jump Jump.
Douyin’s mini game, called Music Jumping Ball, bears a close resemblance to the WeChat title. In the Douyin game, players press on the screen to keep a ball hopping on a row of buildings to the beat of a song, and collect points for each successful jump. Users can share their scores with friends on Douyin.
Beijing-based Bytedance – which has surpassed Uber Technologies to become the world’s most valuable start-up, with a US$75 billion valuation – previously launched a series of mini games within its news aggregator app Jinri Toutiao, but none of those have become a hit.
Bytedance declined to comment on the new Douyin game or the company’s video game operations.
Douyin may prove to be a better platform to host games than Jinri Toutiao. The app’s overseas version is known as TikTok, and it became the world’s most downloaded iPhone app in the first quarter of last year, with 46 million downloads. Overall, Douyin and TikTok have more than 500 million global active users.
Gaming is a big theme among the millions of short clips that Douyin users create every day. Last month, Douyin users helped a wacky casual game about throwing people off the rooftop become the most downloaded game in Apple’s App Store in China, after videos of them playing it gained prominence on the platform.
Bytedance’s latest foray into video games has come amid a move by China’s internet giants to broaden their content offerings to gain greater user “stickiness.”
In December, Kuaishou, another popular short-video app backed by Tencent, started to test its own mini game function. Its first game also looks similar to WeChat’s Jump Jump.
Screenshots of WeChat’s popular mini game Jump Jump / Photo credit: ReignDesign
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