The meeting between social and gaming passes through Virtual Reality

After the rumors of the past few days, ByteDance takes action. The Chinese tech company that owns the social TikTok has bought the virtual reality startup Pico. The economic extent of the deal has not been disclosed, but ByteDance has released a statement that “Pico’s hardware and software technologies, as well as the talents and in-depth expertise of his team, will support our entry into the world of virtual reality. representing at the same time a long-term investment in this emerging field ”. In the first quarter of 2021, Pico took third place worldwide in the branch of the production of VR devices, with shipments that grew by 44.7% compared to the same period last year. Based in Beijing, it has around 300 employees and sells all over the world. The acquisition of Pico by ByteDance, famous for the micro-video social network TikTok, spread worldwide, and the Chinese equivalent Douyin, marks an important step for the diversification of the business. A move that comes after the acquisition, in March, of an important video game production studio, Moonton, for 4 billion dollars, which marks the run-up, on the domestic market, to the giant Tencent, but also a new push towards a market international that moves tens of billions of dollars every year. The goal is to intertwine social media with gaming platforms, using the former to advertise the latter: TikTok has about 700 million monthly users, Douyin 600 million daily users. And it aims to further expand its offer and the ability to compete with other social networks. Game with video of up to 15 seconds in length, it started in July to give the option to go up to three minutes, and is now testing a feature to go up to five or even ten minutes. A radical change for the platform, which allows its content creators to explore other formats and compete with the world of tutorials, especially on YouTube. YouTube, which in the meantime has equipped itself by launching Shorts, a section dedicated to short videos.The entry into virtual reality puts it on the same playing field as Facebook, with its Oculus VR division, a direction also followed by Apple which last year has acquired NextVR, raising speculations on a possible production of Cupertino-branded hardware. “We are optimistic about the future of virtual reality, and we consider it absolutely in line with our mission,” they explain from ByteDance. The company, according to sources in the Financial Times, is planning to go public in Hong Kong between the fourth quarter of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, despite Beijing’s squeeze on tech companies, in which the government aims to calm down IPOs. abroad under the pretext of protecting sensitive data. The decision to pause the first IPO and the willingness to cooperate with the government has put ByteDance in a good light with the authorities, and could therefore pass the security review imposed by Beijing in order to obtain authorization to go public on the Hong Stock Exchange. Kong after the summer.