BEIJING, January 10 (TMTPost)— Latest news showcased TikTok owner ByteDance Ltd. is taking steps to scale down its gaming business.

Credit：Nuverse

Nuverse, a game developing and publishing brand under ByteDance, is in talks with Tencent about sales of many gaming assets, affecting project teams located in various cities including Shanghai and Shenzhen,  LatePost learned from multiple sources. The Chinese news media outlet reported Nuverse wants to sell such games that it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in development and is offering big discounts. The anime-style role-playing game "Crystal of Atland" and  sci-fi survival game "Earth: Revival", two popular titles which have been published by Nuverse, are reported to be on sales through auctions, with valuations assessed by methods such as gross billing multipled by valuation multiples. The winning bidders are not determined yet as the offer price is relatively high and operating costs required for ongoing input to run the game project in the future are involved in the transaction, according to the report.

Nuverse’s official later responded the unit has not finalized deal with Tencent and it is negotiating with a number of potential buyers, including Tencent, for game operations.

News months ago first revealed ByteDance decided to retreat from gaming after two ambitious years. Nuverse, the unit publishes “Marvel Snap”,  will significantly scale down its business, look for divestiture of existing titles with good performance while maintaining operation, and shut down all of unreleased titles except few innovative projects and related technology projects, ByteDance confirmed to TMTPost App late November.

Nuverse told TMTPost it does have restructure and business adjustments to focus more on some of new types of games and exploration of relevant technologies. The ByteDance subsidiary set up in 2021 said it will continue work well on operation games already launched to fully protect the rights and interests of players.

ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo and Yan Shou, head of Nuverse, have discussed the decision to scale back repeatedly for a long time, people close to ByteDance revealed to TMTPost. According to the people, Liang believes ByteDance should make efforts on and move resources to more basic, innovative and imaginative projects rather than gaming, as the company has been working for the “big and comprehensive" projects in the past year, leaving the projects without any focus and scattered resources.

ByteDance and Nuverse didn’t specify how many employees will be affected during the restructure. They didn’t respond to queries about future of Shanghai Moonton Technology Co.,  and another gaming unit C4games. Prior to ByteDance’s confirmation, Reuters’ sources said the TikTok parent will seek to divest from titles already launched.  Bloomberg treported ByteDance plans to lay off several hundreds of staff in gaming and phase out Nuverse. The company was reported to wind down projects under development and consider sales of existing titles. It was also weighing sales of Moonton, a studio it took over for US$4 billion in 2021, according to the report. 

ByteDance later responded that it had made difficult decision to restructure its gaming business following a review. It added that it regularly reviews its businesses and make adjustments  to center on long-term strategic growth areas.

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