According to four people familiar with the situation, TikTok has been conducting experiments in Vietnam to allow users to play games on its video-sharing app as part of plans for a major push into gaming.
Including games on its platform would increase ad revenue and the amount of time users spend on the app, which is one of the most popular in the world, with over one billion monthly active users.
Vietnam is an appealing market for social media platforms such as TikTok, Meta Platforms’ Facebook, and Alphabet’s YouTube and Google, as it has a tech-savvy population with 70% of its residents under the age of 35.
According to the people, TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, aims to expand its gaming offerings across Southeast Asia. Two of them believe it might happen as early as the third quarter.
Because the material has not yet been made public, the sources declined to be identified.
TikTok said it had tested adding HTML5 games, a prevalent type of minigame, to its app through partnerships with third-party game developers and studios like Zynga, but declined to comment on its intentions for Vietnam or its broader gaming goals.
