After discussions earlier this year, ByteDance has agreed to sell its games unit Moonton to Savvy Games Group for $6 billion. Moonton is known for popular mobile titles in Asia Mobile Legends: Bang BangWhich has been downloaded 1.5 billion times. According to an internal memo seen by Moonton’s CEO, the transaction is set to be finalized in the “near future.” bloomberg.
ByteDance is shutting down its gaming arm and purchasing Moonton by 2023, two years after it first acquired the developer. Around the same period, TikTok parent was shutting down its Nuverse Gaming branch, which published notable titles like marvel snap And Ragnarok X: The Next Generation. The company has since shifted its focus to AI and is competing with Chinese rivals to develop chatbots and foundational models.
Savvy Games, owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), is going in the opposite direction. Last year the company (through its subsidiary Scopely) acquired Pokémon Go developer Niantic for $3.5 billion. PIF was also among the major investors that bought Electronic Arts in a blockbuster deal worth $55 billion last year. The Saudi fund also owns a 7.5 percent stake in Nintendo.
The sale is the latest chapter in the recent gaming industry consolidation, which saw nearly 45,000 jobs lost over a brutal three-year period between 2022 and 2025. According to a recent GDC study, a third of workers in the US video game industry were laid off in the past two years.
<a href