ByteDance’s Ohayoo has published more 150 games with 500 million downloads
Ohayoo is the new kid on the block in Chinese games. The company is a division of ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, and it has published more than 150 games since 2019. Ohayoo’s games have been downloaded more than 500 million times, and eight games have hit No. 1 on the Chinese free game download list.
That’s a pretty spectacular result in games, and one that I wasn’t aware of until recently. Ohayoo isn’t known well in the West as the company hasn’t focused much on press to date, said Yufan Wang , head of global marketing and partnerships at Ohayoo, in an interview with GamesBeat. But it’s worth knowing because Ohayoo is helping casual and hypercasual game developers break into the Chinese market, which is the biggest in the world. And it has natural synergy with social media networks like TikTok.
“The mission is to enable creativity and happiness for the smaller game developers via publishing services that we provide,” Wang said.
To raise its profile and find more games, the company recently held its first Global Game Developer Competition, where more than 200 games from 22 countries were submitted. The company selected 10 winners from among 125 small and indie game developers. The finalists are competing for a Final Four awards with a grand prize of $100,000 and a publishing contract for first place.
