TikTok makes its gaming case
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Undeterred by U.S. government threats of a ban, TikTok executives are angling the popular social media app as an essential part of the video game industry’s future.
Driving the news: TikTok’s top gaming executives took their pitch directly to game makers at last week’s Game Developers Conference, including a promotional panel held hours after the company’s CEO was grilled by Congress over privacy and security concerns.
Details: Their core argument was a business pitch, meant to entice game makers and marketers to promote their games on the platform.
- TikTok isn’t just loaded with people who love games, they said, but is a unique window into the many ways people enjoy and obsess over them.
- Beyond traditional gameplay clips and how-tos, TikTok users make gaming-themed videos about fashion, food, memes or just walking through life with the stiff gait of a computer-controlled game character.
What they’re saying: Many people have different images in their mind when they think “gaming,” Harish Sarma, TikTok’s global head of sports and gaming content, told Axios during an interview at the company’s San Francisco offices the day before the panel.
- “And on Tik Tok, actually all of those things are true.”
Numbers: The stats TikTok bandies are massive — a billion global users, more than half of them getting served up gaming content by TikTok’s algorithm, according to the company’s data.
- Hashtag activity around some games is enormous: 72 billion video views for #callofduty, 368 billion views for #fortnite, and 669 billion views for one of the planet’s biggest hits outside of the U.S., #freefire.
- Phil Hickey, CMO at Sybo Games, told Axios that the fanbase for his company’s ubiquitous cellphone game Subway Surfers is still the biggest on YouTube, “but TikTok will beat that this year.” To capitalize on user trends, the company’s two content creators make videos for TikTok nearly every day, he said.
Between the lines: TikTok is in a wooing stage while acknowledging that game marketers have to go beyond their comfort zone of promoting products to try to catch the wave of community hashtags.
- “The gaming industry is beginning to get there,” said Rema Vasan, head of games marketing at TikTok.
- She cited a 2021 Electronic Arts-backed TikTok user challenge tied to the made-up language of the Sims as a sign of a studio getting it.
Yes, but the threat of an all-out TikTok ban in the United States looms.
- Asked if game makers express concern about that, the execs described the company’s publicly shared positions on sequestering data on U.S. users to U.S. servers and an outside company. They also cited TikTok's content moderation policies as proof of concern over user well-being.
- Beyond that, says Assaf Sagy, TikTok’s head of global gaming: “No one is able to say what is going to happen tomorrow.”
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