After four months, ByteDance once again released game business updates.
On March 14, ByteDance released an internal email, stating that "after undergoing adjustments to its strategic positioning, the game business will return to incubation status. In the next stage, the core of the game business is to patiently do stable operations and follow the rules of industry development and keep exploring with a mission and vision." In the letter, it is announced that a series of organizational structure adjustments for the game business line: Hua Wei, the head of human resources at ByteDance, will become the head of the game business, and the original NUVERSE Business leader Yan Shuo will be transferred to the company's finance department. This news was confirmed by the relevant person in charge, saying, "The content is true and this is a normal personnel adjustment."
In November last year, ByteDance suddenly announced the abolition of its game business and large-scale layoffs of its game R&D and publishing business brand NUVERSE. NUVERSE was founded in 2019. With the support of large amounts of capital investment, it has a game product that has entered the top 10 best-selling list in just 5 years. At that time, NUVERSE had about 3,400 employees across the country, and its first self-developed game "Crystal of Atlan" had only been online for 4 months.
According to sources, the reason for this decision is that Byte Games has been pursuing "big and comprehensive" projects in the past few years, with unfocused projects and scattered resources. In the future, Bytedance hopes to invest energy and resources into more basic, innovative and imaginative projects.
Parallel to the layoffs are the sales of game projects. So far, the mobile game "Crystal of Atlan" has also found a buyer, which is FunPlus, an overseas gaming company. The two parties expect to complete the transfer in 2025. However, due to the large number of studios and game categories in NUVERSE's business line, and the different development and operation stages, in addition to "Crystal of Atlan", there are also a large number of game projects for sale and there is no definite news, such as "Earth: Revival" and "One Piece: The Bloodline".
Among the major game projects sold in the past few months, the largest is Tencent taking over some of ByteDance's games under development. Tencent merged two game studios to form Saros Network Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd., which was merged into Lightspeed & Quantum Studios Group.
There is no news of the sale of Moonton, a gaming company that ByteDance previously acquired with a large sum of money, and it is not certain whether ByteDance will retain some game projects. In the future, Byte Games will continue to maintain the operation of its existing relatively mature products and sell game projects.