A startup called Playbyte wants TikTok to become gaming, as the company's recently launched iOS app provides tools that allow users to create and share simple games on their phones.
Like TikTok, Playbyte offers a full-screen vertical scroll where you can play games created by others.
And like the popular app and social networking apps, the feed becomes more personalized over time to deliver more of the types of games you love to play.
What is the Playbyte app ?
It is a social application that includes games that users have created, you can scroll the feed to find, play and interact with those games, and you as a user can also create and share games.
While creating games usually involves some aspect of programming, Playbyte games are created using simple building blocks, emojis, and even photos from the Camera Roll on your iPhone.
The idea is to make game building just another form of self-expression, rather than an introductory learning experience that attempts to teach users the basics of programming.
Playbyte app features
In essence, Playbyte game creation is powered by a lightweight 2D game engine built on web frameworks, allowing users to create games that can load and play quickly even on slow connections and older devices.
After you play a game, you can like and comment using the buttons on the right side of the screen, which is very similar to the look and feel of Tik Tok.
Over time, your Playbyte feed shows you more of the games you've enjoyed as the app leverages its understanding of in-game images, tags, descriptions, and other interaction analytics to deliver more games it thinks you'll find compelling.
At launch, users already created a variety of games using the app's tools, including simulators, tower defense games, combat challenges, obbys, mystery killing games, and more.
This application is supposed to be a social networking application and not just a gaming application, but it targets a large segment of young users and teenagers.
Playbyte games have their own set of limitations, in addition to their simplistic nature games are limited to five scenes, thanks to this limitation a format emerged where people create games that have an intro screen where you press play, a story intro, a challenging gameplay section and then a story conclusion.
Produce and share a lot of games:
In addition to easy-to-use game building tools, Playbyte also allows game assets to be reused by other game creators.
This means that if someone with more experience builds a game asset using custom logic or groups multiple components together, the rest of the user base can benefit from this work.
The point behind this is that if you have an idea — like a game picture in your mind — you should be able to very quickly search for new assets or accumulate other assets you've previously saved.
Then just drop it, mix and match - almost like Legos - and create something that's 90% of what you imagined, without any addition on your part.
How does Playbyte make money from it?
In time, Playbyte plans to monetize its feed through brand advertising, possibly by allowing creators to promote their games as well as global brands that will promote their games in the app in the future.
It also wants to create some kind of patronage model at a later date, that might include either subscriptions or even NFT for games, but that's going to go further than that.
Perhaps when creating a game, users will be able in the future to activate paid add-ons, to develop better games and get more features for them.
The company can also provide a donation feature to game creators in the app, and financial support from which they can deduct their commission to fund their operations.
Download the Playbyte app for free:
The app currently has more than 10,000 users, and it attracts younger teens who are active on Tik Tok and other co-op games, such as Roblox, Minecraft or Fortnite.
You can download the application by clicking here.