- TikTok’s parent company ByteDance has reportedly acquired Moonton, the company behind Mobile Legends.
- According to Yuan Jiang, CEO of Moonton, the company would operate independently from ByteDance after the acquisition.
- Tencent allegedly made a bid on Moonton, but the bid was matched by ByteDance last week, which was followed by this acquisition.
TikTok’s parent company ByteDance has reportedly acquired Moonton, the company behind the popular mobile MOBA game Mobile Legends: Bang Bang. ByteDance stated that its video games unit Nuverse will handle the Shanghai-based company, Moonton, to further expand its video games business. This might be one of the biggest acquisitions of the year and shows how serious ByteDance is about entering the mobile gaming industry. It means that the company now has a MOBA game under its belt and can now directly compete with one of the biggest names in the mobile MOBA industry, such as Honor of Kings and League of Legends: Wild Rift.
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TikTok's Parent Company ByteDance, Acquires Moonton
According to video game analyst Daniel Ahmad, ByteDance acquired Shanghai-based Moonton Technology to further expand into the mobile gaming market. According to Yuan Jiang, CEO of Moonton, the company would operate independently from ByteDance after the acquisition. However, for confidentiality purposes, no further information has been provided.
“Through cross-team collaboration and drawing on lessons and insights from its own rapid growth, Moonton provides the strategic support needed to accelerate Nuverse’s global gaming offerings,” ByteDance said in a statement.
In recent years, ByteDance has been mass hiring employees who recently worked from the three prominent tech firms in China: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. According to Tech Crunch, The company’s headcount in their gaming division has reached over 3,000, a considerable jump from last year’s 1,000. These employees are scattered across ByteDance’s gaming studios in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen.
According to Reuters’ report, Tencent allegedly made a bid on Moonton, but the bid was matched by ByteDance last week, which was followed by this acquisition. The acquisition now means that the company now has resources to compete against Tencent’s Honor of Kings and Riot Games’ recently released League of Legends: Wild Rift.
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Moonton’s popular mobile MOBA game title Mobile Legends is already one of the biggest mobile games in the market with a reported one billion installs and 100 million monthly active users. With ByteDance investing in the mobile gaming market, it has the opportunity to expand on its market and its esports scene.
