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.”

“Often I'm helping other people in the way that I'd like to be helped myself. And you hope that people will pick up on those cues. But I'll tell you what's even better than cues, which is just telling people that you'd like" their help.

• Morgan Jaffit, former director of the now-shuttered Defiant Development, at his GDC panel about learning from the failure of a game studio.

“It has been crazy. We are cannibalizing between studios. A lot of the new players join — Google, Amazon and all these big guns — and the veterans are starting their own studios. Like, almost every month we have new studios, new projects, new teams. And they all want senior people.“

• Emile Liang, a former Ubisoft producer now leading a 70-person, mostly senior-level team at NetEase Montreal, talking to Axios about the challenge of recruiting senior talent, especially in studio-dense Montreal.

“The scale that Roblox is at makes it an attractive target even for large game studios. And our toolchain is more and more sophisticated to allow thousands of creators to work together without stepping on each other's toes.”

• Nick Tornow, vice president of creator engineering at Roblox, whose company came to GDC with a reel showcasing the latest games being built with advances from the $35 million Roblox Game Fund.

“I hope you will never need the tips I just shared with you.”

• Elena Lobova, co-founder of gaming networking group GDBAY, at her panel about how her team in Ukraine managed to hold a previously scheduled online game jam during the first week of the Russian invasion. Some of the advice: Increase the “bus factor,” or number of people who’d have to be unavailable for a project to stall out.

🎮 GDC organizers are looking into setting up a hotline for reporting abuse or harassment, after reports of assault and drink spiking at satellite events and a possible harassment incident on the show floor, Games Industry reports.

📈 The U.S. video game industry had a strong February, with $4.6 billion in spending (up 6% from the year prior), according to Circana, formerly the NPD Group.

• The best-selling game was Hogwarts Legacy, the hottest console PS5.
• HBO’s “The Last of Us” appeared to boost Last of Us games, with the original gaming rising from 11th to sixth best-selling game on the monthly charts and even the unadapted PlayStation 4 sequel, The Last of Us Part II, rising from 41st to 18th.

🤔 Electronic Arts will lay off 6% of its workforce, or nearly 800 workers, as part of a restructuring plan.

• The company posted $289 million in operating income for the quarter ended Dec. 31, nearly triple what it made the year prior.

😲 Sega is the latest longtime E3 exhibitor to skip this year’s show, according to IGN.

🥊 WB Games is taking its Multiversus fighting game, which technically has only been in beta since its mid-2022 launch, offline. The game has cooled significantly since its hot start, but is slated to return in 2024.

❓ Bungie just re-upped its trademark for the mysterious gaming project “Matter.”

👍 A new ability called Ultrahand in Nintendo’s upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, is a throwback to a toy Nintendo released in the 1960s before it was making video games, Polygon explains.

Friday, March 31

• The Tetris movie (Apple+) premieres.

Saturday and Sunday, April 1 and 2

• A quiet weekend (and reminder: don’t fall for any prank news on April Fool’s Day).

Monday, April 3

• A quiet Monday.

Tuesday, April 4

• Meet Your Maker (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) and Road 96: Mile 0 (PC, console) are released.

Wednesday, April 5

• Wall World (PC) is released.
• "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" premieres.

Thursday, April 6

• Across the Valley (PSVR2, Steam VR) is released.
• Everspace 2 (PC) advances from early access to 1.0 release.

Friday, April 7

• EA Sports PGA Tour 2023 (PC, PS5, Xbox Series) is released, but it is available three days earlier for anyone who pre-orders the game.

In-person indie showcases were a GDC highlight this year, offering an inspiring preview of what the public can play in the future.

My favorite that I played: Paper Trail (PC, console, mobile), in which you fold the game’s levels, as if they were made from two-sided paper, to navigate a character through them.

My favorite that I watched someone else play: Viewfinder (PC, PlayStation), in which players use virtual photos to transform their character’s surroundings (you need to see this one in action).

Hardest-hitting: Venba (PC, Switch), a cooking game with an unexpectedly powerful story.

Best-named: Crime O’Clock (PC, Switch), a hidden-picture game that’s also a murder mystery.

• With honorable best-name nods to Gunbrella and On the Peril of Parrots.

Backstage at the Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Choice joint awards show last week, I used an AI chatbot to help me interview the winners.

• Interviewees picked a word, then ChatGPT wrote a question for them using their word.
• Nine interviews total; first three are below.

First developer/test subject: Mads Vadsholt, fresh off of an Excellence in Audio win, for The Forest Quartet.

• His word: “Jazz.”
• The AI-generated question: How did jazz music influence the sound and overall vibe of The Forest Quartet? Were there any particular jazz musicians or styles that inspired your work on the game's soundtrack?
• His answer: “I grew up with both my parents being musicians and coming from jazz ... so it's a genre that’s very close to my heart. The fact that it’s a band that lives in a forest, I think jazz is a nice genre to fit into that because it’s a bit of an introspective genre, a bit of a loner genre.” His jazz inspirations: Bill Evans, Jan Johansson and Miles Davis.

Second developer: Cosmo D, winner of the IGF’s grand prize for Betrayal at Club Low.

• His word: “Pizza.”
• The AI-generated question: “Can you share with us any fun or interesting stories from the development process of Betrayal at Club Low, such as any memorable brainstorming sessions or late-night pizza-fueled coding sessions?”
• His answer: He added pizza as a theme to his game while searching for ways to make its dice-based gameplay more comprehensible. “I was eating this spinach roll from a really good old school pizza joint [called] the Pizza Wagon in Bay Ridge. … I thought: This has got to be the direction of this game. It's got to be pizza as dice. It's something people can understand: It's a hook. I can play with ingredients. It gets you money. Everybody likes pizza. Pizza opens doors. Why not?”

Third developer: Aryo Jati Darmawan, from Voracious Games, which won the IGF’s audience award for Potionomics.

• The team’s word: “Character.”
• The AI-generated question: “How did you approach creating unique and memorable characters in Potionomics, and were there any particular inspirations or challenges you faced during the character design process?”
• Darmawan’s answer: "The game is about vendors. They're like alternative heroes, They're not the main character of a traditional [role-playing game]. They're the side characters. And I wanted to tell their story. So trying to just create like everyday, 'People of New York' kind of stories with these characters was like the main thing."

Takeaways so far: ChatGPT’s questions are wordy.

• Interviewees who get to pick words for questions choose words they know they’ll have something to say about.