On January 20th, TikTok For Business and Newzoo released a white paper titled "TikTok: The New Front for Gamers Worldwide". Most of the macro data in the report are similar to Newzoo's Global Games Market Report released last July, highlighting the fact that mobile has become the world's largest and fastest-growing gaming platform. Notably, the report devotes a lot of space to comparing and analyzing the gaming habits of TikTok and non-TikTok users among mobile gamers. It states that the core of the report is that "TikTok will be the new frontier for mobile game publishers and advertisers to expand their territories.”
To quickly recap what we learned from the Global Games Market Report back in 2021: in terms of the number of players and revenue, mobile games had the highest share of the global market in 2021. The number of mobile game players reached about 2.8 billion, while revenue reached $93.2 billion, more than PC and console combined. Regionally, 64% of mobile game revenue in 2021 came from the Asia Pacific. The top-ranked Chinese market generated $31.8 billion in revenue, more than the second-place United States and third-place Japan combined.
The global game market size in 2021
As for the Chinese market, Chinese game developers made about $18 billion in overseas markets in 2021, with a compound annual growth rate of 27.8% in overseas revenue from 2019 to 2021. We can say that the efforts of Chinese game developers trying to enter overseas markets in recent years have paid off.
That leads to the focus of this white paper from TikTok: to help Chinese game developers gain insight into the current situation of the global mobile game market and better arrange their game business worldwide through TikTok in 2022. The 13 countries and regions surveyed do not include China, but rather overseas markets that Chinese game developers want to know about and enter the most, such as the United States, Japan, and Brazil.
The report said that 49% of the mobile gamers who participated in the survey were TikTok users. Compared with non-TikTok users, they are more diversified and younger, with higher game participation and higher willingness to pay. The creation of relevant content inside and outside the game has become a new trend for player-game interaction.
TikTok’s branding solutions for different games
(left: PUBG Mobile in Vietnam; right: Hochi Shojo in Japan)
As the world's leading short video entertainment platform, more and more players on TikTok are sharing and creating gaming content through short videos. It seems that TikTok is envisioning a new entertainment experience that integrates gaming, content creation, and social life. It hopes to become a new front to bring together game developers and players worldwide. Will this help ByteDance crack the gaming industry? That is yet to be seen.